NTSB Flight Data Shows the Miami 767 Crew Called for a Go-Around After Touchdown

Federal investigators have released the first recorder data from the Boeing 767 freighter that ran off a runway at Miami International Airport on September 6, 2026, killing five people in vehicles on the ground. In an investigative update issued on September 9, the National Transportation Safety Board said the jet touched down at a groundspeed of 158 knots and that a pilot called for a go-around after the aircraft was already on the runway.

The recorded data shows no indication that the aircraft’s speed brakes or thrust reversers were ever deployed.

What the recorders captured

Both recorders were read out successfully at the NTSB’s Washington laboratory. The flight data recorder held roughly 54 hours of data across more than 400 parameters, and the voice recorder more than two hours of good quality audio.

The voice recording describes an approach that one pilot was openly worried about. About 1 minute 42 seconds before the tape ends, as a pilot called for flaps 20, the other cautioned that they were too fast. Comments about excessive speed continued through the rest of the recording, the NTSB says, without a consistent verbal response.

Automated alerts then arrive in quick succession: two “sink rate” warnings, the “minimums” callout, and a “too low terrain” alert that annunciated four times about 17 seconds before the wheels came down.

Flaps 30, the landing setting, was not called until ten seconds before touchdown. The flight data recorder picks up the rollout from there, counting down to the end of its recording.

The two recorders’ clocks have not been precisely synchronized, so the sequences cannot be laid exactly over each other. Measured against its own recording, the go-around call came about 16 seconds after sounds consistent with touchdown, and five seconds before sounds of the aircraft departing the pavement.

Why those four seconds at 120 knots matter

Industry guidance treats a go-around begun after the wheels are down as a maneuver with one rule: once started, finish it. The Airbus briefing note written for the Flight Safety Foundation’s approach-and-landing task force states that a crew initiating a rejected landing “must be committed to proceed with the intended maneuver and not retard the throttle/thrust levers in an ultimate decision to complete the landing.”

Reversing an already initiated rejected landing, it says, often ends in a runway overrun, an impact with obstructions, or major damage and post-impact fire. The NTSB has not said why the throttles came back to idle at Miami, and the transcript that may answer it does not exist yet.

The other half of the picture is what did not happen. Ground spoilers dump lift so the wheels carry the weight and the brakes can bite, reversers throw engine thrust forward, and on a fast landing those two systems do most of the early work.

Neither appears in the data, and braking stopped for four seconds while thrust went up, so the jet carried its energy far further down runway 30 than a normal landing would.

The Flight Safety Foundation’s go-around study found that only about 3 percent of unstable approaches end in a go-around, despite airline policies that call for one, and it names failure to go around the number one risk factor in approach and landing accidents.

Certification work has been moving the problem into the cockpit: EASA approved Embraer’s runway overrun alert system in July 2026, a function that warns a crew when the landing will not fit the runway ahead.

The people who were killed

The five people who died in the Miami runway excursion were in vehicles, not aboard the aircraft. NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy said at a September 7 briefing reported by CBS News Miami that they were in a van inside the airport boundary, which had seven people aboard, and a car on a road outside it.

Homendy said the aircraft travelled about 1,300 feet (400 m) past the paved surface, shorter than the 2,000 feet first estimated from tracking data. Both pilots survived with injuries.

The NTSB will convene a group to produce a written transcript of the voice recording, and a preliminary report normally follows within about 30 days.