The tower told the Amazon jet it was cleared to land. It did not tell the crew what the wind was doing. Four minutes earlier, on another frequency, controllers had passed the gusts to someone else.

That is one of the central findings in the National Transportation Safety Board's preliminary report on 21 Air flight 7598, the Amazon-branded Boeing 767-300 freighter that overran Runway 30 at Miami International Airport on 6 September 2026 and killed five people on the ground. The report was published on 2 October.

It also confirms, in hard numbers from the flight data recorder, how long and how fast the big freighter landed, and how little it slowed down.

The missing wind

According to the preliminary report, FAA rules required the local controller to include wind information in the landing clearance when there was a tailwind component. Flight 7598 got the clearance but not the wind.

The wind had been broadcast to other traffic about four minutes earlier as 190 degrees at 19 knots, gusting 22 knots, but the 767 crew was not on that frequency. Whether knowing it would have changed the outcome is something the final report will have to address. It is not the only problem the data reveals.

Long, fast and barely slowing

The recorder data paint a picture of an approach that was never stabilised. The jet crossed the runway threshold fast, touched down about 3,750 feet along the roughly 9,360-foot runway at about 160 knots groundspeed, and kept going.

The crew applied the wheel brakes at 146 knots, then advanced the throttles towards go-around thrust about eight seconds later, with around 930 feet of runway left. Braking resumed with only about 415 feet remaining. According to the report, there is no evidence that the speed brakes or thrust reversers were deployed.

A late go-around attempt on a heavy jet with little runway left is one of the worst places to be. Commit to the go-around and the aircraft may not climb away in time. Abandon it and there may not be enough concrete left to stop.

What the crew said

The cockpit voice recorder, released in transcript form in September, showed the first officer warning that the aircraft was flying too fast on the approach, alongside repeated automated alerts. The preliminary report does not assign blame; that comes with the final report, typically a year or more away.

Five people were killed when the freighter left the runway and struck two vehicles. Amazon has since suspended its work with 21 Air. The question now is how a chain of small failures, a missing wind call, a fast approach and an indecisive landing, lined up on one September day in Miami.

Sources: NTSB, AVweb, Airways Magazine, One Mile at a Time, aeroTELEGRAPH