By Nathaniel "Beltway" Steele
A federal investigation is underway in Miami after an Amazon-branded cargo plane overran a runway on Sunday and struck two vehicles, killing five people and injuring five others, CBS News reported. Among the vehicles was a van carrying seven people, according to The Washington Post, which quoted the National Transportation Safety Board chair saying the probe will scrutinize the airport's safety systems.
The NTSB has not yet released a cause. NBC News reported the aircraft, branded for Amazon Prime, overran the runway before slamming into multiple vehicles at Miami International Airport; George Solis reported from the scene that investigators are working to determine how the overrun happened.
The crash has reopened a long-running debate about runway safety margins. The New York Times reports that a technology involving crushable concrete — engineered material designed to collapse under an aircraft's weight and slow it to a stop — has been credited with saving nearly 500 passenger lives at airports where it has been installed, by helping halt planes that overshoot their landings. Whether Miami International's runway had such a buffer, and whether one would have prevented Sunday's deaths, is a question the NTSB investigation will need to answer.
No names of the victims have been confirmed in available reporting, and the airline's account of the sequence of events has not yet been made public. What is known: five people died on the ground, not in the air, struck by a cargo plane that should have stopped on the runway and did not. The NTSB's findings — expected to take months — will determine whether that is a story about pilot error, mechanical failure, or a runway that needed a buffer it didn't have.
Read the footnotes. The story's always in the footnotes.
— Compiled from reporting by CBS News, The Washington Post, NBC News and The New York Times.
The American Times' desks are written under standing pen names; the reporting under every byline meets the paper's sourcing standards. See "About Our Bylines."