Miami names five airport cleaners killed when an Amazon cargo jet left the runway

The five people killed when an Amazon-branded cargo jet left the pavement at Miami International Airport on 6 September were members of a contract cleaning crew, the Miami-Dade Sheriff's Office said on Tuesday. They were riding in a company van on airport property when the Boeing 767-300, arriving from San Juan as Amazon Air Flight 7598, overran runway 30, hit navigation equipment and slammed into the vehicle.

Sheriff Rosie Cordero-Stutz named the dead as Rolando Aleman Leon, 55; Yoel Rodriguez Naranjo, 53; Julio C. Pineda, 75; Carlos Acosta Fajardo, 53; and Javierkys Reyes Quevedo, 47. The van belonged to Professional Ocean Service Corporation, which cleans aircraft for airlines at the airport. Seven people were inside it.

Five others were hurt. Eugenio Corredor, 79, and Ridoel Averhoff Diaz, 32, remained in critical condition on Tuesday. Roosevelt Sebastian Perdomo Torres, 36, was listed as stable. The two pilots, Jaime Felipe Silva Molina, 37, and Joseph Caroll, 55, were treated and released. The jet also broke through a perimeter fence and struck a Toyota Corolla Cross on a public road beyond the airport line.

A third flight of the day

Jennifer Homendy, chair of the National Transportation Safety Board, said on Monday that the aircraft was a Boeing 767-33A operated by 21 Air LLC of North Carolina for Amazon. The airframe, registered N1997A, is 32 years old. It was built as a passenger jet, delivered in 1994, and converted to a freighter in 2015. It is powered by two General Electric CF6 engines.

The same aircraft had already flown Cincinnati to Miami and Miami to San Juan earlier on Sunday. The return from Luis Muñoz Marín International Airport lasted about two hours and eleven minutes. Touchdown on runway 30 came at about 1:53 p.m. local time. Flight-tracking data published by Flightradar24 put the jet at 112 knots as it left the usable runway. Homendy said the wreckage ended about 1,300 feet past the paved end.

Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said rescue crews reached the fire within seconds. Miami Fire Chief Raied Jadallah said more than 200 firefighters responded. Several of the injured had to be cut out of wreckage. Homendy later described the ground track as “utter devastation,” with air bags, fencing and destroyed navigation aids along the path.

Weather, runway and unanswered questions

The National Weather Service recorded thunderstorms and wind gusts up to 30 miles per hour around the field at the time of landing. Investigators have not said whether weather, a late touchdown, a brake or thrust-reverser problem, or a decision not to go around caused the overrun. Homendy declined to assign a cause at the Monday briefing and said further information might follow on Tuesday.

Federal officials are examining whether the jet landed too far down the runway and why the crew did not reject the landing. The cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder were recovered. A full NTSB report typically takes a year or longer.

Miami International is the busiest U.S. airport for international freight. The crash closed runways through the Labor Day weekend rush. FlightAware counted more than 160 cancellations and nearly 325 delays by late Sunday. By noon on Monday the tally still included 65 cancellations and 153 delays.

Who was on the ground

The dead were not passengers and not flight crew. They were cleaners moving between aircraft on a road that sits inside the airport fence, close enough to the runway end that an aircraft leaving the pavement at landing speed could reach them. The second vehicle, outside the fence, shows how little buffer remains once a heavy jet is no longer on the paved strip.

21 Air holds the operating certificate. Amazon brands the service as Prime Air. That split will shape the legal and insurance fight that follows. Families of the cleaners, the owners of the van and the SUV, Miami-Dade County and the two companies all sit on different sides of the same 1,300-foot track.

Amazon has not published a detailed public account of the landing. 21 Air has said it is cooperating with the NTSB. Neither company has released cockpit communications or a maintenance history for N1997A beyond what investigators have already put on the record.

The identification of the five dead closes one part of the story and opens another. The question now is why a 32-year-old converted 767, on its third sector of the day, could not stop on a runway that handles this kind of traffic every afternoon.