Atlas Air 767 down/Texas
 

FAA: Boeing 767 cargo jet operated by Atlas Air Inc. has crashed into Trinity Bay near Anahuac, Texas, while en route from Miami to Houston; initial reports indicate 3 people were on board.

FAA statement says it was Atlas Air Flight 3591. Radar contact lost about 30 miles SE of IAH. Crash said to have occurred about 12:45 local.

Details are pretty scant right now as this just broke. However, Trinity Bay is a busy place so there may well be several witnesses if not video.

https://6abc.com/crews-responding-to...y-bay/5153229/

Live feed.

A Twitter post by @JasonWhitely states tail number is N1217A, a 26-year old aircraft operating as Amazon Prime Air, one of 30 767s in Amazon's fleet.

FAA reported as saying no survivors. RIP.

https://cimg5.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune....eae30df380.jpg

FAA has it listed as registered to Andromeda Leasing LLC

https://registry.faa.gov/aircraftinq...mberTxt=N1217A

I'd be careful with FR data extrapolating such massive sinkrates or whatever. That wx radar pic looks interesting though.

From a Houston station
https://www.click2houston.com/news/b...board-faa-says

They were penetrating that line of storms.

Running of the FR24 track the aircraft's final left turn doesn't seem to follow the standard approach, which aircraft immediately following it did.


I have had a look at the raw data and it seems like the aircraft was not in a rapid decent at the time the turn was made, the following graph for altitude starts at when the turn commences

https://i.imgur.com/4oVdFZR.png

Though it was very foggy this morning with a rather violent front forecast to come through, the fog would have lifted by the time of the crash. I live a few miles NE of IAH on the approach to 26R and the front was never as bad as predicted. It was actually much nicer than expected here, though I acknowledge that weather from one side of the Houston metro area to the other can vary quite considerably. However, the Chambers County Sheriff just gave a press briefing where he stated several witnesses in boats and at a nearby park had stated that the plane basically nose-dived into the bay. He stated surface visibility as good and weather was not reported as an issue.

Aerial pictures of the site show a pretty sizable debris field with not many large pieces visible. The largest piece I've seen was what appeared to be a portion of the vertical stab with the right side of the Amazon logo. The water is murky, five feet deep max with plenty of shallow mud marsh. This is going to take a while to piece together. The sheriff said Chambers County will make their hangar available to NTSB and have offered a building in the park near the scene for use as a command center.

Looks like an in-flight break up.
Condolences to families.
RIP

Debris Field.
https://www.foxnews.com/us/cargo-plane-carrying-at-least-3-people-crashes-in-texas-bay-officials-say

In-flight break-ups are almost unheard of, especially at a relatively low airspeed when level or in a shallow descent. And the 767 is a tough old bird.

Other possibilities exist, but the FDR and CVR should give an explanation. Adverse Wx unlikely to cause such a dive.

Local rumor is the flight was being directed around area of heavy/extreme precipitation prior to lost contact. There is also supposedly a LiveATC tape out of the flight. A bad day for all.

ATC audio on youtube. Accident apparently around 9:00.

I have to say that I find that a very strange statement to make at this point, even coming from a Canadair CL605 pilot.

Live ATC
 

one of last transmissions was a male voice with an accent requesting deviation 'west' (of the cell I assume), and ATC said no, so they said they would deviate East. This is from FlightRadar 24 and shows last radar reply and crash site.

https://cimg4.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune....d62ebc1b21.jpg

Load shift?
Amazon stuff isn't usually too heavy, but maybe a pallet/container broke loose and started a cascade.

Small package freight debris is going to be dispersed rapidly by wind and current, and a full analysis of their location and time since event would be needed to work out whether they have been liberated in flight. The B767 has had only two in flight events with a rapid descent to impact; Lauda 004 and Egypt Air 990. Lauda was from a structural failure resulting from uncommanded TR deployment on the LH PW4060 engine, resulting in overload of the vertical stab, and a torsional failure of the tail and a rapid overload in negative g of the wings. Egypt Air was.... disconcerting and remains disputed along national lines. The event timeline however is compelling and similar events have occurred far too often in the industry. The B767 has had it's fair share of AD's on the stabiliser and the attachment structure going back more than 20 years. The CF6 engine on the 76 has had it's fair share of uncontained failures. Gust front related overload is raised due to the existing weather that was being avoided/penetrated, but would not by itself have led to an overload of the system, and 18 years after AA587 the industry is more aware of the impact of rudder doublets. The debris trail of large components will be telling.

R.I.P.

Absolutely no comms, not even a "mayday", so it seems something happened fast and/or they had their hands full.

Wondering about a possible mid-air but it's all speculation at this point.

sudden sharp dive could indeed indicate some occurrence with the horizontal stab/elevators, or even a crewmember falling onto the controls.

Forgive me, but am I hearing things at 2:33 here? Is there somebody shouting ''pull''?

As opposed to the ridiculous supposition of a possible suicide, a more likely possibility would be a multiple bird-strike through the windscreen. But this is all guessing way ahead of the curve. What we do know for sure is that several families suffered an unimaginable loss today, and they need our thoughts and prayers more than anything else right now.

Anyone have an idea what was in the cargo?
Atlas advertises that they can handle outsize cargo. Was it just Amazon cargo or a commercial mix?

Bird strike
 

Amazon primarily uses their freighters to move relatively large shipments between their distribution centers, then sends the stuff out from their distribution centers via local services do the deliveries.
Amazon sells a lot of personal electronics (think Li batteries) hence my initial thought of maybe a cargo fire - but as I noted that's not likely given how suddenly what ever happened must have happened.

cabin pressure would have been reduced to very little at this stage of the flight..who's to know..everybody only guessing at this point, and there is no "sudden change" normally in the pressurization of the aircraft, the system brings it down at nice comfortable 350-500 feet per minute...wait and see...hope it had a new enough DFDR to give good information...

That's an aircraft leasing subsidiary of Atlas. Amazon Air dry-leases the aircraft from an Atlas subsidiary and hires Atlas pursuant to a CMI (crew, maintenance, insurance) agreement to fly, insure and maintain it.

Actually, it works this way: (1) customer places order; (2) algorithm determines which DC(s) are going to contribute product to the order, based on a number of factors; (3) box containing material for a specific customer is prepared at each necessary DC; (4) an algorithm determines, for that day, what the best way to send it to that specific customer is (organic Amazon, FedEx, UPS, Ontract, Lasership, etc.); (5) package leaves DC. If it's going to be riding Amazon Air, it goes to the departure airport, where it is built into a mil-style pallet with a cargo net over it (if the flight is not going through CVG) or put into a can (if the flight is going through CVG, where the cans will be unloaded, the packages sorted, and the packages placed in cans for the flight to the destination airport); this may have changed by now as Amazon cans proliferate. The cans or pallets are loaded on the aircraft. At the destination airport, the packages are trucked to an Amazon "sort center" (formerly called an Amazon "postal sort center", PSC), such as Avenel, NJ. There, the air shipments are run through the center along with ground shipments that have been truck line-hauled by Amazon contractors from closer DCs than this package's DC was. The packages are sorted at the SC for last-mile delivery either by the USPS (biggest provider of last-mile for Amazon-organically-line-hauled packages), by a local carrier like Lasership/Ontrack, or more recently by Amazon-hired local delivery contractors or even by AmazonFresh when those trucks are first moving into an area. If it's going to USPS, Amazon-contracted delivery takes it to the injection point, which is usually the DDU (Destination Delivery Unit, meaning the local post office), and the local mailman takes it from there. The USPS doesn't usually touch it until it is dropped by Amazon at the DDU, although in some places with lighter volume it might get injected at the three-digit-zip destination regional center, called the SCF (sectional center facility), with USPS handling it from there.

So what goes on the planes is thousands of to-the-consumer Amazon packages for which Amazon Air is just one of several potential shipment options. At the other end, they get delivered by USPS or Amazon-contracted delivery.

If I didn't say it earlier, it's Amazon's dry-leased plane. Nobody but Amazon gets to put anything on it. Atlas doesn't get to use it for anything other than Amazon Air flights without express permission from Amazon, which as a practical matter they're not going to receive.

If it's going to go by UPS or FedEx, those guys put it into their own network near the origin DC and keep it on their network all the way until they hand it to the consumer (except to the extent Amazon ever uses FedEx SmartPost (a horrible service that I think they avoid) or UPS Surepost (which is a better service that plans for the package to be delivered by UPS to the local destination post office for last mile, adding a day, but which often ends up with the package staying on the UPS network all the way to the consumer if they're going to be delivering nearby that day).

Sorry but I don't hear it even with the headphones turned up to 11.

30,000 fpm is 341 mph

I can't here anything other than 'ok' however that ok too seems to be in a different tone compared to the other transmissions, very rapid response.

I've had a listen to the original Liveatc audio and can't hear it there either, however this transmission was less than 60 seconds prior to the first "Giant 3591 Houston Approach?"
At 8.35 on the audio file is the ok message, the atc request is at 9.25, the first ELT request at 10.05. Would interesting to know if the first "Giant 3591 Houston Approach?" was because the control had lost the aircraft on radar or because he noticed it was in a dive/descending below assigned alt.
http://archive-server.liveatc.net/ki...2019-1830Z.mp3

Has a Boeing windscreen ever been penetrated by a bird?

Your altitude graph was interesting. Those blips upward are most likely a function of an FR24 / Flightaware characteristic where the data set records the assigned altitude for a return or two before returning to the reported altitude. Most likely the path is smooth along that plot until the last moments where it falls off a cliff.