The pilots involved in Sunday’s fatal Amazon cargo plane crash in Miami were being interviewed by National Transportation Safety Board investigators on Wednesday.
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The pilot and first officer had been hospitalized after the Boeing 767 ran off the runway while landing at Miami International Airport, crashing into a van and killing five people inside.
Cellphone video showed one of the pilots jumping out of a door near the cockpit after the crash as the plane was on fire.
Both pilots were later released from the hospital. Two other people remained hospitalized in critical condition, while a third was in stable condition, officials said Tuesday.
The pilot is 55-year-old Joseph Carroll, while the first officer is 37-year-old Jaime Felipe Silva Molina.
A LinkedIn profile believed to belong to Carroll said he lives in Colorado and works for cargo carrier 21 Air.
Silva Molina lives in South Florida, according to online records.
At a news conference Tuesday night, NTSB Chairwoman Jennifer Homendy said as of March 31, the pilot had 7,145 hours of flight time, while the first officer had 2,655 as of Aug. 13.
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Homendy and NTSB investigator Chihoon Shin said they wanted to hear the pilots’ accounts about what happened before releasing a readout of the cockpit voice recorder.
They said flight data suggests the plane tried to abort an unsteady landing and appeared to briefly attempt to perform a go-around to retry the landing approach before abandoning that and trying to stop the plane. The data showed the thrust reversers were never used to help stop the plane, Shin said.
“What we need to do is talk to the crew and get their account to understand how they were manipulating the controls in order to get a better understanding of the situation. We need that information, that’s a key piece of information,” Shin said Tuesday night. “With the cockpit voice recorder, while we have that data, crew accounts and crew interviews will help fill in some of the blanks for us that the crew remembers in terms of actions that they might have done but not verbalized, and so that’s something that we need a complete understanding of before we’re to analyze what happened with the throttles in this case.”
Witness Abraham Altamar, who was working at a nearby warehouse, told NBC6 he spoke with one of the pilots just after the crash and let him use his phone to call his wife.
“He was shaking, he was in shock,” Altamar said. “I mean, we kept asking him, like one of my coworkers was asking him, like, ‘what happened?’ And he mentioned something that it was something with the brakes.”
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