The pilots of the Amazon cargo jet that overran a runway at Miami International Airport on Sunday were not fully in control of the aircraft as it touched down and appeared to have temporarily considered aborting the landing, according to a timeline of the final seconds before the deadly crash that federal investigators unveiled late Tuesday.
The sequence of events detailed by National Transportation Safety Board investigators likely cost the pilots hundreds of feet of runway length and crucial seconds in the moments before the plane ran off the runway, striking two vehicles as it exited the airport grounds and crossed a public road, killing five before coming to a stop, according to aviation experts who reviewed the timeline.
“You either land or you go around. You don’t land, attempt to go around, and then get back to landing again, unless there was some mechanical malfunction,” said Steven Arroyo, an aviation expert and retired United Airlines pilot.
“I have never seen anything like this,” he added of the information that N.T.S.B. investigators detailed Tuesday night.
The N.T.S.B. has yet to release a transcript from the cargo jet’s cockpit voice recorder, which they are expected to publicize Wednesday. Investigators are also expected to interview the aircraft pilots then, according to Jennifer Homendy, the board chair.
During a news conference late Tuesday night, Chihoon Shin, the crash investigator, laid out a timeline of what happened during the last 30 seconds captured by the flight data recorder. Flight data recorders are designed to stop operating when the airplane’s electric power supply is cut off, as would happen during a crash.
The problems with the landing were apparent from the start of that timeline.
At 30 seconds out, according to Mr. Shin, the plane’s nose landing gear and its right-side main landing gear touched down. At that point, the plane was traveling at nearly 182 miles per hour — faster than what is considered ideal for such planes, according to experts.
It would take another seven seconds before the pilots applied the brakes, and another four seconds after that before the left-side main landing gear would make contact with the runway, Mr. Shin said.
That touchdown sequence was “really bad,” said Michael O’Donnell, an aviation consultant who previously led the Federal Aviation Administration’s aviation and airport safety divisions.
“The nose should not hit first,” he explained. “That is an unstable approach right there, and that really tells me that the go-around should have been executed a lot sooner and they weren’t in total control of the aircraft .”
But perhaps more critical was what the pilots tried to do next. Fifteen seconds before the recording ended — or four seconds after all their landing gear was on the runway — the pilots released the brakes, and appeared to try to increase thrust, in what aviation experts said was a telltale sign of a “delayed decision” to abort the landing.
The plane was moving at 138 miles per hour when the brakes were released, and “throttles increased to values consistent with go-around thrust,” Mr. Shin told reporters.
The pilots did not idle the throttles and reapply the brakes until 11 seconds before the recording ended, at which point the aircraft was moving at nearly 135 miles per hour, according to Mr. Shin. While the brakes remained engaged for the rest of the recording, he added, the pilots never deployed the airplane’s speed brakes, which are flaps located on the wings, or its thrust reversers, both of which could have helped slow the aircraft further.
“There’s all kinds of red flags with a go-around decision made that late,” Mr. O’Donnell said, adding, “If you do the math, that’s a lot of runway that went by while they were doing that.”
Investigators did not detail how close to the end of the runway the plane was at the junctures they identified.
“That’s something we still have to determine,” Ms. Homendy told reporters.
But at the ground speeds that N.T.S.B. investigators specified, the plane would have been moving down the runway at a pace of about 200 feet per second during those four seconds when the brakes were released.
It is not clear if those roughly 800 feet, and the lost seconds of deceleration, might have allowed the plane to come to a stop before it struck the vehicles, or have made the difference between life and death for the victims. When the recorder stopped, the plane was still moving at nearly 75 miles per hour, according to Mr. Shin.
But aviation experts said that the pilots’ apparently erratic and conflicting actions in the moments before the crash were perplexing.
“If you’re going to do a go-around, you absolutely have to commit,” said Pablo Rojas, a lawyer for Podhurst Orseck, a Miami law firm that specializes in aviation accidents, noting that hesitation by the crew cost valuable seconds on the runway.
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