Posted by mckn1ght 13 hours ago
Airlines in the US do not pressure pilots to avoid go arounds. Pilots in the US do not delegate life or death decisions to ops, especially since the FAA legally holds them accountable for that. All pilots are aware that they are responsible for the decision to go around or not.
Any airline found to be pressuring pilots to avoid go arounds would be in a world of pain with the FAA.
On cargo flights in particular timing and fuel usage are less critical than passenger flights, and a go around doesn't affect either much.
Pressure to avoid go arounds would also be incredibly counter productive since go arounds exist to preserve life and property. Pilots do go arounds to avoid costly incidents.
You are correct that the question is why they didn't do a go around, but I would bet a large sum of money that airline pressure to avoid go arounds was not a factor.
> The Amazon Prime Air Boeing 767 cargo plane that crashed off a Miami runway on Sunday, killing five people, was operated by a North Carolina company that has been accused by past employees of violating safety regulations, legal documents reveal.
There's a lot in the article, but this allegation is worth highlighting:
> Seuring's attorney, Michael Anello, told the judge that another 21 Air pilot, Johnny Salmonson, "was being pressured to fly in periods of time that were too short to comply with the proper amounts of rest, and that implicated safety. The layovers were too short."
If any of those are true, it will be very bad for the carrier, but they are not related to any of the failures being reported on.
If pilots weren't being given enough rest time, as alleged, you don't believe that might affect decision-making in the cockpit?
There have been accidents around the world where pilots were trying to save fuel, get off work at a normal time instead of 2 hours extra holding, not wanting to divert and not be home, try to get on the ground so they don’t go over their max hours for the day, etc.
Yes it’s counterproductive. *It happens*. External or internal, it happens.
Sure there have been plenty of incidents. Can you point to one in the US, with pilots flying big planes, that hasn't led to regulatory change?
Its worth pointing out that pilots are almost always paid by flight hour. In other words, they get paid more to go around.
That one did lead to major regulatory changes. It wasn't in the US though but there was an American plane involved (which was not to blame)
Note: Both planes were American. One of the carriers was not. NTSB gets involved whenever it is a US carrier OR manufacturer, so they have a ton more data than just US carrier incidents.
Has timeliness based performance reviews ever been reported at any US carrier in the past half century?
Take a look at Southwest's safety record. I believe they have 1 fatality due to an air incident in their history due to an uncontained engine failure that was not related to maintenance.
Also this was Amazon, not Southwest.
Construction companies in the US do not pressure employees to get shit done. Construction workers do not delegate the decisions to work in sketchy circumstances, especially since OSHA holds them accountable for all that.
See how silly that sounds?
They cook up the rules to be all compliant and whatnot and then everyone breaks them a little pretty often and in tasteful ways in order to actually get the job done. If you get caught or screw up, it's on you.
I assume this sort of pressure happens a lot less with pilots because of the cost of screw ups but there's still probably some implied pressure there.
Airlines are much more tightly bound by the FAA than any construction company is to any regulatory agency. Airlines have to get permission to let their pilots read documents off an iPad instead of paper, for example. It just isn't a good comparison to compare the most safety aware industry on earth to one famous for ignoring safety rules.
I've worked construction. I have a pilots license in multiple countries (including the US). They aren't the same.
I didn't say the same. I said the pressure was probably there too. But you can construe it as the former because that's a way easier thing to argue with.
I assume that since the NTSB database makes every single incident investigation public you can point to at least one instance where an ATP was pressured into avoiding a go around?
Commit to an action that ultimately caused a crash because they wanted to achieve ancillary goals (e.g. not be late)? Tons.
They call this "get-there-itis" (makes me feel so dirty trotting out buzzwords like that).
Can you point me to one of the specific incidents you are citing since both the new search and the old search seem to be broken for that specific term?
Edit: just to be clear: I’m not saying that companies don’t pressure transportation workers into bad decisions. My original supposition is that I have never heard of, nor would it make any sense, for a US airline to have a policy of avoiding go arounds. “Land rhe plane on the first try, or else…” is an exceptionally stupid policy.
In German railways there is a saying "Fracht motzt nicht, Fracht kotzt nicht" - freight neither complains nor vomits.
I would not be surprised at all to find this kind of attitude in air freight transportation too.
The cockpit voice recorder transcript has the copilot repeatedly saying "we're coming in too fast" but the pilot never clearly acknolwedges.
The copilot ought to have been more assertive and said "We need to go around. NOW."
The pilot shouldn't have needed that. He should have made the call himself, but even if he was unsure, once his copilot called that he should have done the right thing.
Neither of them will ever fly again. The only question now is if either of them will go to prison. There's already a civil wrongful death lawsuit against them.
Why do you say this so confidently? Aviation generally does not have a culture of taking future employment away from people proximate to accidents.
Seems likely the FO will be fine. The CA will have some hard questions to answer.
The thing that amazes me about this is the timeline here:
00:30 The nose and right main gear touched down at a groundspeed of 158 knots.
...
00:19 The left main gear touched down at a groundspeed of 134 knots.
00:15 A pilot called for a go-around.
11 seconds and 24 knots after the nose touched down and then the left main finally also touched down? Wow. Then 4 seconds after all that the go-around. It is one thing to hold the nose off for that long, but a main mount?!
It'll be interesting to see the outcome of the NTSB investigation, they're usually quite thorough.
One of CHR's service providers was conducting hiring shenanigans and not fully, legally screening their drivers. One of the service provider's drivers hit another vehicle and crippled that vehicle's driver, who sued. CHR argued all liability should fall on the trucking company who hired the driver. The Supreme Court said no, CHR could be held liable for negligence in vetting their service provider as well, because it was ultimately CHR's load being carried.
I'm not a lawyer, but under that legal precedent, it seems Amazon might not be off the hook for damages in this case, given it was their subcontractor who was carrying Amazon cargo in a jet with "Prime Air" on the side.
From the reporting and commenting on this incident, that is not the impression I'm getting. This wasn't one bad call after getting half way down the runway, this was a continuous stream of bad decision making for the entire approach, with the copilot suggesting the pilot go around too.
Also: this kind of incident is very rare, so obviously, the vast majority of pilots don't make this mistake.
Don’t get me wrong - if I had to land that plane, I’d likely have overrun the runway too. I’m not saying it’s easy, only that it appears to me that they were operating well outside the documented parameters that are the pilot’s responsibility to know.
I just looked it up, and a 767’s Vref is 122-165kts, with Vref at max weight at 144kts. They touched down at 158kts, nose down. The approach was ~35kts over speed, they were above the glide slope, and not bleeding speed fast enough to sink - so they dropped the nose.
From what I can see, they were screwed the moment they touched down - the last moment they had a reasonable opportunity to abort was when they decided to drop the nose and commit instead.
A decent rule of thumb in aviation (and life…) is that you’re allowed to change your mind once. Waffling kills more people than switching to a bad decision does.
Those are a few situations when a trained individual could make a series of bad decisions. More so if they were forced into the situation (flying) despite raising objections. It has happened to other 21 Air pilots in the past - when they objected to flying but were forced, so who knows?
Absolutely does not absolve this individual of the incident. It’s a burden they’ll have to bear for the rest of their lives. But it could help explain why?
You don't have to extend sympathy, just as you don't have to extend sympathy to drunk drivers who kill people.
Is there anything that can be done at all here?
They have a well deserved reputation for the quality and accuracy of their incident reports, and they don't pull their punches.
I don't have sympathy. I also do know of drunk drivers that have been arrested, who are, good people. Shit happens. I'm not going to judge.
Sincerely, A former military aviator
That said, it is exceedingly difficult to find any explanation for what happened in this case that doesn’t boil down to incompetence or gross negligence.
There were so many opportunities to avoid this accident. The crew seemingly more or less single-handedly punched a hole straight through the entire Swiss cheese model. It’s so bad it’s hard to imagine they weren’t drunk at the controls.
It's also pretty rare for the NTSB to release this much information ahead of their full report. I wonder why.
Even in a case where someone has drilled themselves into a mountainside, there's value in trying to see things like "were they distracted? Was there mechanical failure? Did they have a freak medical emergency and get incapacitated? Did unexpected weather crop up?" And in other cases, it's a "but for the grace of God go I" moment where you understand how they could have made the wrong decision in good faith. Even years out of the cockpit, I'm willing to give most aviators the benefit of the doubt, because God knows I screwed up enough in my day.
But the only thing I can think of that compares to this level of negligence was the F/A-18 pilot 20 or so years ago who lost his wings after booming his non-towered hometown airport at over 500 knots and below 500 feet with absolutely zero pre-authorization or waiver from the FAA for that kind of thing.
From the timeline, one pilot knew they were too fast 90 seconds before touchdown.
The interaction here is eerily similar to the pilot interactions preceding the 1997 Korean Air Flight 801 (B747) disaster in Guam [1]. It's not clear based on the NTSB update if the Captain was ignoring the First Officer or the other way around.
[1]: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Flight_801_-_Aircr...
Prime Air crash: 10+ mandatory go-around triggers were ignored [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49650689 - September 2026