For nearly two minutes before an Amazon cargo plane destroyed a worker's van at Miami International Airport last Sunday, one pilot was telling the other that they were travelling too fast. According to a summary of cockpit voice recordings released on Wednesday by the National Transportation Safety Board, the second pilot never gave "a consistent verbal response" to those warnings. Five workers employed by a plane-cleaning company, all riding in that van, were killed when the aircraft overran the runway by approximately 396 metres, crossed a public road and caught fire. Five more people were injured, two of them critically.

The flight data recorder, released a day earlier, tells a story of an unstable approach. Strong winds were already unsettling the aircraft as it descended. After an awkward touchdown, the crew briefly disengaged the brakes and pushed the throttles forward, apparently attempting to abort the landing and climb away — a manoeuvre known as a go-around. They abandoned that effort just four seconds later.

Automated warnings about descent speed and approaching terrain sounded in the cockpit throughout, which former Federal Aviation Administration official Mike O'Donnell said suggested the plane may not have been configured correctly for landing. O'Donnell, who once oversaw airport safety and crash investigations for the FAA, argued that the crew had options well before the situation became unrecoverable. Spoilers could have been extended, throttles cut and landing gear lowered to bleed off speed. A go-around, he noted, was entirely feasible at the two-minute mark.