Jim Crane, the billionaire owner of the Houston Astros, controls the cargo airline whose plane killed five people in Miami.
Crane, 70, holds the controlling interest in 21 Air through an LLC, according to legal documents and a 2021 memo submitted to the Department of Transportation. The North Carolina-based all-cargo carrier was operating the Amazon Prime Air Boeing 767 that ran off the runway at Miami International Airport last Sunday and slammed into a van carrying a cleaning crew.
“I own the controlling interest. I’ve got all the buttons. I don’t do deals where I don’t have control,” Crane told Freight Waves in April.
When Crane acquired 21 Air in 2021, the company reportedly operated four or five freighter aircraft. He has since expanded the fleet to 16 planes, according to Freight Waves. The business mogul, who lives and works in Houston, is worth $2.5 billion, according to Forbes.
Yet multiple senior staff members had filed complaints against 21 Air before Sunday’s crash, with some saying they long feared exactly this kind of tragedy. The five people killed were part of a cleaning crew in a van struck when the plane overshot the runway, Miami-Dade County Sheriff Rosie Cordero-Stutz said.
“It’s something a lot of us ex-21 Air pilots have been anticipating for a while,” retired 21 Air pilot Tony Bless said. Bless cited perennial concerns including “maintenance safety issues, the pressure out of the chief pilot’s office, and the quality of pilots they would hire.”
Capt. Joseph Carroll, 55, and First Officer Jaime Felipe Silva Molina, 37, were identified as the pilots. Both survived but were hospitalized.
Robert Joslin, former FAA chief scientific and technical advisor, raised pilot fatigue as a possible factor. “Was there fatigue involved? It could have been caused by pilot fatigue,” he said. “It could be that it was an unstabilized approach. And obviously that would involve the pilots.”
Joslin outlined numerous other potential causes. “Braking systems and reverse thrusters could have failed. The pilots could have been off course, or at the wrong angle. The plane could have been too heavy. Or some combination of all of the above,” he added. Normally such failures would be prevented or mitigated with redundancies, assuming the operator follows safety protocols, according to Joslin.
But former 21 Air chief pilot Bruce Joseph testified at a Labor Department tribunal that he had “personal knowledge of people being discouraged” from recording safety concerns. In his resignation letter, Joseph wrote that 21 Air executives were merely “paying lip service” to safety protocols “then doing exactly nothing” when presented with concerns.
21 Air did not reply to The Post’s request for comment. Its website displays a message from current CEO Keith Winters offering his “deepest condolences” to the families of the victims.
The Department of Transportation also did not immediately reply to The Post’s request for comment.
The crash occurred when the Boeing 767 cargo plane, operating as Amazon Prime Air, ran off the runway at Miami International Airport and struck several vehicles, including the van carrying the cleaning crew. The five crew members in the van were killed. The two pilots aboard the aircraft survived with injuries requiring hospitalization.
The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating the crash.