A Boeing 767 freighter in Amazon colours ran off the end of a runway at Miami International Airport on Sunday afternoon, crossed a road beyond the airfield boundary, struck vehicles and caught fire.

Photographs from the scene show the aircraft’s tail, with the Amazon smile on the fin, standing beyond the razor-wire perimeter fence with emergency vehicles alongside it. Miami-Dade Fire Rescue said more than 60 units responded to heavy flames and smoke.

The airport closed all runways and taxiways and departures were grounded.

What is known

The Federal Aviation Administration said a Boeing 767-300 cargo aircraft overran the runway while landing at Miami at about 2 p.m. Eastern, having arrived from San Juan.

Amazon confirmed it was an Amazon flight operated by 21 Air, a US cargo carrier that flies 767 freighters. Amazon does not hold its own air operator certificate for these services; the Prime Air network is flown by contracted operators, of which 21 Air is one.

Miami-Dade Fire Rescue said the aircraft struck multiple vehicles and that crews arrived to find it on fire with heavy flames and smoke showing. Reports of multiple patients were made, but no official confirmation of injuries or fatalities had been released when this was published.

Why an overrun turns serious at Miami

A runway overrun is one of the most common categories of serious accident in commercial aviation, and most of them are survivable. The variable that decides how bad it gets is what lies beyond the paved surface.

Modern airports try to provide a runway end safety area, a prepared strip past the threshold intended to slow an aircraft that fails to stop. Some fit EMAS, engineered material arresting systems, which are beds of crushable blocks that collapse under the wheels and bring an aircraft to a halt in a few hundred feet.

Miami International sits inside a dense urban area with roads close to the airfield boundary. In this case the aircraft did not stop within the airport at all. It went through to a road and hit vehicles, which is why this became a multi-agency emergency rather than a contained incident on the airfield.

Landing an aircraft that will not stop is also a scenario with a long list of contributing factors, from a wet or contaminated runway to touchdown point, approach speed, braking configuration, thrust reverser performance and weight. None of that is known here, and speculating about it now would be worthless.

Footage from the scene at Miami International Airport on 6 September.

Two things worth separating

There is a well-known earlier accident involving an Amazon-branded freighter, and it is not this one. On 23 February 2019 an Atlas Air Boeing 767 operating Prime Air flight 3591 crashed into Trinity Bay near Houston, killing all three people on board. That was a loss of control in flight, in a different aircraft, operated by a different carrier, seven years ago.

Search results and social media are already mixing the two. They have nothing to do with each other beyond the livery.

Cosa succederà dopo?

The FAA has said it will investigate. In an accident of this severity in the United States the National Transportation Safety Board normally takes the lead, and the flight data and cockpit voice recorders will be recovered and read out.

Beyond that, the immediate questions are the human ones: the two-person flight crew, and whoever was in the vehicles the aircraft struck. Those answers should come from the authorities rather than from footage, and they had not come when this was written.

Sources: Federal Aviation Administration; Miami-Dade Fire Rescue; Amazon; CNN; ABC News; CBS Miami; WSVN; NBC News. This article reflects information available on the afternoon of 6 September 2026.