Amazon’s 30-Year-Old Cargo Jet Burns Outside Miami and Five People Are Dead

A 30-year-old Boeing 767, painted up in Amazon’s Prime Air colors, barreled off the end of Runway 30 at Miami International Airport on Sunday afternoon, punched through the perimeter fence, and slammed into vehicles on the road beyond. Five people are dead. Five more are injured, three of them critical. The plane was landing, not taking off, despite what some early reports fumbled. It came in from San Juan, Puerto Rico, flight 7598, operated by a company called 21 Air, which is one of those contract carriers Amazon uses so it can keep its own hands clean when something goes sideways.

Something went sideways.

Aeroprints.com (CC BY-SA 3.0) via Wikimedia Commons

Footage from the scene shows the jet listing against a chain-link fence with black smoke pouring off the fuselage. Miami-Dade Fire Rescue sent more than 60 units. They found the plane engulfed. The mayor, Daniella Levine Cava, confirmed the death count. Amazon put out the usual statement, the one with “deepest sympathies” and “devastating loss” in it, and their spokeswoman Kelly Nantel made sure everyone knew this was 21 Air’s flight, not Amazon’s. You see how that works? When the packages arrive on time, it’s Amazon. When the plane burns, it’s a contractor.

Here is what sticks in my craw. Thirty years old. That aircraft was built when Bill Clinton was president. Amazon, a company worth two trillion dollars, is running geriatric freighters over American neighborhoods to shave a few bucks off shipping costs. And Boeing? This is the same Boeing that can’t stop making headlines for all the wrong reasons. Door plugs blowing out mid-flight. Whistleblowers turning up dead. A UPS cargo jet exploding on takeoff in Louisville. A plane clipping a truck on the New Jersey Turnpike. Now five more bodies on a road outside Miami.

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The FAA and NTSB are investigating. They’re “collecting information.” A cause “has not been determined.” You know what that means in establishment English? It means they’ll issue a preliminary report in six months, a final report in two years, and nobody will remember this happened by then. The machine grinds slow and it grinds expensive and it never seems to land on the people who actually made the decisions.

Was the crew properly trained? Was the aircraft properly maintained? Was Runway 30 even the right runway for a heavy freighter in those conditions? Nobody is asking these questions out loud yet. The experts will tell you not to speculate. The same experts who certified this plane to keep flying three decades after it rolled off the line.

Mark Bess (CC BY-SA 2.0) via Wikimedia Commons

Five people dead on a Sunday afternoon. People who were just driving on a road near the airport, or working on that flight, or doing whatever they were doing before a two-trillion-dollar company’s leftover Boeing came crashing through the fence. And the response from the people in charge will be a press conference, a carefully worded statement, and an investigation that concludes with recommendations nobody is required to follow.

The little guy always pays. The little guy on the road, the little guy in the cockpit, the little guy who lives under the flight path. The executives at Amazon and Boeing will sleep fine tonight. They always do.