Five people died and five more were injured after an Amazon cargo plane crashed at Miami International Airport Sunday afternoon, causing a full ground stop that halted all flights for hours.

The FAA said flight 7598 from Miami-based 21 Air, a Boeing 767-300 from San Juan, Puerto Rico, overran the runway after landing at MIA around 2 p.m. The FAA will investigate the crash, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy posted on X.

After crossing Northwest 67th Avenue, Miami-Dade Fire Rescue said, the plane “struck multiple vehicles.”

Miami-Dade Sheriff Rosie Cordero-Stutz confirmed Sunday evening that the crash killed five people and sent five others to the hospital, three of whom were in critical condition.

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The resulting fire sent large puffs of black smoke into the air. A firefighter was heard on the radio telling his colleagues, “The plane is on fire. The plane is on fire. Put your game faces on guys.”

Emergency radio dispatch traffic painted a chaotic scene facing the fire rescue workers among the 60 MDFR responding units. 

Firefighters are heard scrambling to get hoses close enough to the plane to spray water to suppress the flames. The aircraft’s left engine was also still running as firefighters battled the fire, making it dangerous for them to enter the plane to check for patients inside.

Firefighters are also heard saying that the pilots told them they could not turn the engine off because they would need to “energize” the aircraft. So, firefighters had to flood the engine with water from their hoses to disable it.

Firefighters and paramedics working the road, meanwhile, were busy extricating seriously injured people from vehicles hit by the plane.

The crash froze all travel at MIA for hours on Sunday afternoon. 

As of about 4:45 p.m., according to Flight Aware, MIA had 275 delays — 156 departures and 119 arrivals. The airport also had 82 canceled flights, slightly more departures than arrivals. Flights had begun resuming at some runways by 5 p.m.

Shortly after 5 p.m., Gaurav Sharma, 36, looked at the departures board at MIA for an update on his scrambled plans. His original British Airways flight to London scheduled for 5 pm was listed as canceled. Sharma, in Miami on business from his home in New Delhi, was already rebooked on another flight leaving for London at 7:40 pm. But first, that jet needs to get to Miami — and Sharma’s flight-tracking app showed its arrival time getting pushed back again and again. “I’m checking to see if that plane will get here,” he said. “It’s complicated.”

Shortly after 5 p.m., there were hints of MIA getting flights underway again. A few flights were listed as departed. Greg Chin, an MIA spokesman, confirmed the airport was starting to resume flight operations.

“Two of MIA’s four runways are now open,” Chin said.

What caused the crash?

Pablo Rojas is an aviation attorney with the Coral Gables law firm Podhurst Orseck, which has a history of representing plane crash back to the Eastern Airlines Dec. 29, 1972 crash that killed all 163 passengers and 13 crew members.

Knowing with certainly what happened Sunday is impossible to know so soon after the crash, Rojas said, but there are a number of possibilities that stand out to him. Chiefly, he said, the condition of the plane’s landing gear when it came to a rest.

“You can see it stops in this parking lot area with the landing gear collapsed,” Rojas told the Miami Herald. The nose is kind of dipping down. We don’t know if that’s something that happened late in the accident sequence or early enough to have caused the accident sequence.”

“You can imagine the incident being caused by something else and then the landing gear collapsing, but certainly if there was an issue with the landing gear early in the accident sequence, that’s going to be the first clue for investigators,” he said.

The stormy weather South Florida has been experiencing almost daily this week is also something that investigators will likely be looking at, Rojas said.

“A landing at an international airport is complex. The pilot needs to be communicating with air traffic control. Air traffic control needs to be minding the weather, and communicating that with the pilot. We know we’ve had rain in Miami recently. Air traffic control needs to help the pilot understand the condition of the runway,” Rojas said.

“Planes can land in nasty weather, but obviously, if the runway is slick that can sometimes cause air traffic control to pause or stop landings for a period of time,” he said.

This is a breaking news story and will be updated.

Miami Herald Staff Writer Vinod Sreeharsha contributed to this story.

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