Amazon’s Cargo Contractor, 21 Air, Has Horrible Reputation Among Real American Pilots

An Amazon Prime Air Boeing 767 did not merely miss a landing in Miami on Sunday. It came in high and fast, bounced one gear off the pavement, aborted the go-around too late, never deployed the reversers or the speed brakes, and then rolled a 32-year-old freighter through a cleaning crew’s van and a public road. Five men who clocked in to wipe down airplanes never clocked out. The pilots walked away. One of them, shaking, told a bystander his career was over.

That is the crash. The story underneath it is older, uglier, and not a rumor invented on social media. The airplane was flown for Amazon by 21 Air, a Greensboro-based cargo outfit with an operations shop in Miami and a nickname in pilot forums that should have been a flashing light.

They called it 21 Scare.

What the Recorders Already Show

The NTSB has not issued a probable cause. It does not need five years to describe the last half minute. Nose and right main gear touched at about 158 knots. The left main stayed in the air for another eleven seconds. Brakes on. Brakes off. Throttles shoved toward go-around power. Throttles pulled back to idle. Brakes on again. No thrust reversers. No speed brakes.

Then a 767 that should have been a stopped truck became a blunt instrument and killed Rolando Aleman Leon, 55; Yoel Rodriguez Naranjo, 53; Julio C. Pineda, 75; Carlos Acosta Fajardo, 53; and Javierkys Reyes Quevedo, 47. All of them were in a Ford van belonging to Professional Ocean Service Corp.

The flight was the airplane’s third of the day, San Juan back to Miami after Cincinnati-Miami and Miami-San Juan. Thunderstorms were in the area. A tailwind gust near 30 mph has been mentioned. Weather is not an excuse for leaving the airplane in the air for a third of a 9,000-foot runway and then changing your mind twice about whether you are landing or leaving.

Captain Joseph Carroll, 55, had 7,145 hours and received his 767 type rating in May, four months before this landing. First Officer Jaime Felipe Silva Molina, 37, had 2,655 hours, a 767 rating from April 2025, and an aeronautical engineering degree from Colombia. Both were treated and released. Investigators planned to sit them down Wednesday before releasing the cockpit voice recorder.

The Company Amazon Hired

Matt Walsh put the hiring question on the table Monday, and he did not invent it. 21 Air is controlled through an LLC by Houston Astros owner Jim Crane. It is one of Amazon Air’s contract carriers. The pilot group, according to engineer Nick Plumb’s public-resume review that Walsh cited, ballooned from roughly 20 in 2021 to about 135 as Amazon shifted additional 767s over from Atlas Air. Those résumés show prior flying in Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, Central America, Ethiopia, and India, plus permanent residents and other work-authorized noncitizens.

That is not a conspiracy theory. It is a staffing pattern. Cargo outfits live on thin margins. Amazon pits contractors against each other. The cheap way to grow a roster is to take the pilots the majors and the better cargo shops already washed out.

Forum veterans on Airline Pilot Central have been saying that out loud for years. Almost every pilot who left ABX for 21 Air, one wrote, was asked to resign because of how poorly they did in training. Another described a Newark taxi incident in which a Cargo South 767 crew never turned on the beacon, blew a 2,500-foot clearance, and drew livid ATC while struggling with English and a low-altitude capture.

“Amazing they haven’t bent up a 767 yet,” one jumpseater wrote, after listing terrain warnings, high-altitude stalls, and automation messes. They bent one up on Sunday.

A May 2023 FAA letter, which Walsh published, allowed 21 Air to substitute its own check airman for an FAA inspector on at least one takeoff-and-landing leg of initial or upgrade training. Honor system. The same federal instinct that let Boeing grade its own homework.

Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?

Matthew 7:16 is not a weather briefing. It is a hiring standard. A company that grows that fast, on that kind of paper, with that kind of reputation, will eventually put its fruit on a runway in front of other people’s families.

The Whistleblowers Were Not Anonymous Trolls

Before Walsh touched the microphone, CBS News and the Miami Herald had already laid out a paper trail. Former 21 Air pilot Karl Seuring, more than thirty years in the cockpit, says he raised safety concerns and a manager told him, “It’s not going to change.”

He filed a retaliation complaint. OSHA rejected it. He appealed to a Department of Labor tribunal that was still pending when the 767 left the pavement. His lawyer described pressure to fly with rest periods too short to be legal.

Former chief pilot Bruce Joseph testified that people were discouraged, “on numerous occasions,” from logging problems in the safety-management software. The then-director of safety, he said, told him not to put anything in the system before talking to then-CEO Mike Mendez. Most reports, Joseph said, never got filed unless he pushed.

Retired fighter pilot Don Helmig lasted three months. In a June 12, 2021, resignation email to Crane he wrote that everywhere he looked there were issues, and that the company paid “lip service” to Safety Management Systems and then did “exactly nothing.”

Retired pilot Tony Bless, who also testified, told CBS the Miami crash did not come out of the blue. He cited maintenance deferrals on converted passenger jets, pressure from the chief pilot’s office, and “the quality of pilots they would hire.”

Those same former pilots alleged the company staffed men who could not communicate safely in English. That is the piece the respectable press wants to treat as impolite. It is also the piece that matches the radio work Walsh played and the Newark story from the forums. English is not a diversity accessory in a cockpit. It is how two men and a controller keep a hundred-ton machine from becoming a weapon.

21 Air has denied the retaliation claims. The company said Seuring was fired for misrepresenting his history, not for talking. Mendez testified that his job was to run a safe airline, “not to hurt people and not to hide anything.”

After Sunday, 21 Air CEO Keith Winters offered condolences and cooperation. Amazon offered the same and pointed at the NTSB. Nobody offered an explanation for why a contractor with that file was still wearing the Prime Air paint.

What This Is and What It Is Not

It is not established that Carroll or Silva Molina were illegal aliens, visa frauds, or men who failed every checkride they ever sat. Carroll holds FAA ratings across multi-engine jets and helicopters. Silva Molina’s public profile is a Colombian engineering degree and a 21 Air first-officer job. Work-authorized foreign pilots are legal.

Competence is a different question. So is the company that selects them, trains them, schedules their third flight of a stormy Sunday, and then lets them fly an unstable approach into a city.

It is also not “just DEI,” as if a slogan in a United recruiting ad explains every bad landing in America. What it is, is the same cheap-labor instinct this country already learned the hard way with CDLs, hospital night shifts, and meat plants.

When the payroll shrinks and the roster has to grow, standards become a cost center. Forums fill up with warnings. Regulators write exemption letters. A contractor gets the Amazon contract. Then five men in a van become a statistic, and the network waits for the final NTSB report the way a man waits for a gravestone to tell him what he already saw.

Pilots on that outfit predicted a bent 767. Bless said a lot of the ex-captains had been anticipating it. Walsh said the footage made pilot error obvious and the remaining questions were who hired them, how they were trained, and what the FAA was doing instead of watching.

Those are still the questions. The recorders will fill in the last twenty seconds. They will not explain why a company with a scare for a nickname was trusted with other people’s lives in the first place.