Abstract
The September 6, 2026, runway overrun of a Boeing 767-300 freighter at Miami International Airport, operating for Amazon’s Prime Air network under the certificate of 21 Air, LLC, occurred within a commercial structure that separates three functions American aviation law has historically assumed would reside in a single accountable entity: brand and network design, aircraft ownership, and operational control. This paper describes that structure, identifies the specific bodies of law positioned to be tested by the resulting regulatory and civil proceedings, and assesses which features of the arrangement are genuinely without precedent and which are ordinary industry practice. It makes no claim regarding the cause of the accident, which remains under investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board, and expresses no view on the outcome of any proceeding.
1. Introduction
Contract air cargo in the United States operates through arrangements in which the entity holding the customer relationship is not the entity holding the operating certificate. This is unremarkable in itself; it describes DHL’s domestic network, the FedEx feeder system, and — in the passenger world — the regional carrier system that has functioned for four decades. The structure at issue here is a variant with an additional feature: the brand holder also owns the aircraft and designs the network, while holding no certificate of any kind.
On September 6, 2026, a Boeing 767-300 freighter arriving from San Juan overran Runway 30 at Miami International Airport, crossed a road, struck vehicles, and caught fire. Five people were killed and five injured; all decedents were occupants of vehicles on the ground.[^1] The FAA identified the flight variously as Prime Air Flight 7598 and 21 Air Flight 7598 in its own communications. Amazon stated that the aircraft was operated by 21 Air and that it would cooperate with the investigation.
The accident places a structure that has grown steadily for a decade under simultaneous examination by the NTSB, the FAA, the Department of Transportation, and civil courts — four institutions applying four different standards to overlapping facts. This paper maps that terrain.
2. The Structure: Three Layers of Separated Function
Layer one: brand, network, and metal. Amazon designs the route structure, sets schedules, holds the shipper relationship, and owns or leases the airframes, which it supplies to contract carriers. Of 21 Air’s sixteen Boeing 767s, six were furnished by Amazon.[^2] Amazon holds no air carrier certificate. Its regulatory status is that of an indirect air carrier under 14 C.F.R. Part 296 and 49 C.F.R. Part 1548.
Layer two: the certificate. 21 Air, LLC holds the Part 121 operating certificate and a DOT certificate of public convenience and necessity. It began flying for Amazon in November 2024, taking over domestic work previously performed by Atlas Air, and it flies concurrently for DHL Express.[^3] As the certificate holder, it holds operational control as a matter of law.
Layer three: residual foreign commercial influence. Cargojet Inc., a Canadian all-cargo carrier, held a 25% interest in Avia Investments, LLC — the holding company controlled by James Crane that sits above 21 Air — from August 2021 until announcing divestiture on April 2, 2026.[^4] The parties stated they would continue to collaborate on select commercial matters, reportedly including consulting and simulator training.
Each layer is lawful in isolation. The legal questions arise at the seams.
3. The Regulatory Baseline: Operational Control
Operational control is defined at 14 C.F.R. § 1.1 as the exercise of authority over initiating, conducting, or terminating a flight. Part 119 requires that a certificate holder maintain that control over every flight conducted under its certificate and employ accountable management personnel to exercise it (14 C.F.R. § 119.65). For supplemental operations, responsibility rests jointly on the certificate holder and the pilot in command (14 C.F.R. § 121.535).
An uncertificated party that assumes these functions — flight release authority, go/no-go determination, crew assignment, airworthiness release, diversion authority, ownership of the training program and general operations manual — is conducting operations as a direct air carrier without authority, exposing itself to civil penalties under 49 U.S.C. § 46301 and the carrier to certificate action.
A commercial customer may nonetheless specify city pairs, block hours, departure times, on-time performance targets, liveries, and penalties for missed departures without approaching this line. 21 Air’s described business is white-label carriage for customers who own aircraft but hold no certificate.[^5]
This is the least contested issue in the case. The answer is already recorded in operations specifications and manuals that predate the accident. It is worth noting that the documentary record is thinner than it would otherwise be: 14 C.F.R. § 91.23(b)(1) exempts leases from the truth-in-leasing filing requirement where the lessee is a Part 121 or Part 135 certificate holder, so Amazon’s dry leases to 21 Air generate no public filing identifying the party with operational control.[^6]
4. Owner and Lessor Liability Under 49 U.S.C. § 44112
This is the sharpest issue the case presents, and it is sharp because of where the victims were standing.
Section 44112(b) limits the liability of a lessor, owner, or secured party for death, injury, or property loss on land or water to circumstances in which the aircraft was in that party’s actual possession or operational control. The Florida Supreme Court construed the provision in Vreeland v. Ferrer (2011), holding that its preemptive reach extends only to ground victims and not to persons aboard the aircraft, reasoning from the statutory text. The corollary is that for ground victims, preemption operates at full strength — displacing Florida’s dangerous instrumentality doctrine, which would otherwise impose vicarious liability on an aircraft owner.
The decedents here were on the ground, in Florida, in vehicles struck by the aircraft. Section 44112 therefore applies at its strongest, and Amazon’s exposure as owner-lessor collapses into the statutory condition: actual possession or operational control.
Two observations follow. First, the regulatory question and the tort question converge on the same phrase but are asked by different institutions applying different standards; a Part 119 determination that 21 Air held operational control does not automatically resolve the § 44112 inquiry, and the weight the statutory analysis should give a regulatory determination is unsettled. Second, a threshold fact governs whether the provision is engaged at all: whether the accident airframe was one of the Amazon-supplied aircraft. Public reporting does not establish this. If it was not, § 44112 drops out and exposure reduces to direct-negligence and agency theories.
5. Apparent Agency and Brand Fusion
The Restatement (Second) of Torts § 429 addresses liability where a principal holds out a contractor’s services as its own. The doctrine developed largely in hospital and franchise contexts, where the injured party relied on the appearance of agency in selecting the service.
The facts here press the doctrine at its weakest point. The aircraft carried Prime Air livery; the flight was identified by the FAA under both the Prime Air and 21 Air names.[^7] But the decedents relied on nothing — they were performing contract cleaning work adjacent to a runway. Whether apparent agency can attach absent reliance is a real doctrinal question, and the cargo sector has not presented it before, because no prior cargo brand has been this thoroughly fused with its operators in name, livery, and network identity.
Related theories not dependent on reliance remain available: negligent selection or retention of an independent contractor (Restatement (Second) of Torts § 411) and the retained-control doctrine (§ 414), which asks a factual question about actual practice rather than contractual labeling.
6. The Preemption Asymmetry
The Airline Deregulation Act’s preemption provision, 49 U.S.C. § 41713, bars state regulation of an air carrier’s prices, routes, and services. Amazon is not an air carrier. Its uncertificated status, which relieves it of Part 119 and Part 121 obligations, correspondingly denies it the preemption defense that certification would supply.
At the same time, federal law continues to furnish the standard of care in aviation safety while leaving state law to supply the remedy (Abdullah v. American Airlines, 1999; Sikkelee v. Precision Airmotive Corp., 2016, 2018). Amazon thus occupies an unusual position: measured against federal aviation standards it has no certificate obligation to satisfy, while lacking the shield certification would have conferred. Whether this asymmetry is stable — whether it will generate pressure toward certification, or toward extending some form of preemption to non-carrier network operators — is an open question the litigation may begin to answer.
7. Citizenship, Actual Control, and Cabotage
A U.S. air carrier must be a citizen of the United States: its president and two-thirds of its board must be U.S. citizens, no more than 25% of voting interest may be foreign-held, and the carrier must be under the actual control of U.S. citizens (49 U.S.C. § 40102(a)(15)).
ALPA has contested 21 Air’s status at DOT since 2021, arguing that the Crane–Cargojet structure functioned as a vehicle for a Canadian carrier to reach U.S. domestic traffic, and pointing to an aircraft interchange arrangement that placed a Canadian-registered aircraft on wholly domestic routes.[^8] 21 Air responded that the DOT Fitness Office had reviewed and confirmed its citizenship, including Crane’s relationship to Cargojet and the commercial agreements between the two companies, and that domestic flying by a U.S. airline with U.S. crews is not cabotage.[^9]
Cargojet’s April 2026 divestiture removes the equity predicate. Two things nonetheless keep the question live. DOT’s continuing fitness authority under 49 U.S.C. § 41110(e) does not lapse, and an accident is a conventional trigger for reopening review. And the sequence of early 2026 — a chief executive installed in late 2024 removed in February 2026 amid reported Cargojet influence, followed by divestiture in April — bears on what actual control meant during the period when Amazon aircraft were being onboarded and crews trained.[^10]
The doctrinally notable feature is this: DOT’s actual-control test is a totality-of-circumstances inquiry with no bright lines, developed case by case through proceedings involving DHL’s U.S. operators in 2003–2004 and Virgin America’s certification in 2006–2007. It has not been applied to a structure in which residual foreign influence runs through training and consulting rather than equity, financing, or governance. Should the investigation reach crew training or standard operating procedures, that relationship becomes a fact in two proceedings simultaneously. This observation identifies an intersection of legal questions; it is not a claim about causation.
8. Fitness Across Two Agencies
DOT assesses managerial competence, financial fitness, and compliance disposition. The FAA assesses operational safety through certificate management. A carrier that roughly doubled its fleet within fifteen months while turning over senior leadership sits at the intersection of both mandates.[^11] Rapid expansion is a recognized risk factor in FAA surveillance planning, and managerial competence is an enumerated DOT prong. Whether either agency’s review cycle is calibrated to a carrier scaling at that rate is a structural question the case surfaces independent of cause.
9. Labor Law
ALPA represents pilots at both 21 Air and Cargojet, which supplies both its standing and its motive in the DOT docket. Two doctrines are positioned for testing. The National Mediation Board’s single-carrier analysis asks whether nominally separate carriers are commonly controlled; divestiture largely resolves this prospectively. Separately, whether Amazon’s scheduling and performance regime renders it a joint employer of contract-carrier crews, and whether it constitutes a common carrier by air or a company under common control with one for Railway Labor Act purposes (45 U.S.C. § 181), remain unresolved. Amazon has consistently resisted that characterization, and that position sits in tension with any argument it might advance elsewhere concerning operational coordination.
10. The All-Cargo Carve-Out
The flight and duty time limitations of 14 C.F.R. Part 117 apply to Part 121 passenger operations; all-cargo operations remain outside them. The carve-out has been contested since the 2011 rulemaking, and each subsequent fatal cargo accident has renewed the argument. The standard rebuttal — that no passengers are exposed — is complicated when the exposed population consists of ground workers rather than persons aboard. This is the most likely locus of legislative pressure arising from the accident.
11. Investigative Process Constraints
Two mechanical features shape the downstream proceedings. Party status in an NTSB investigation is discretionary, and whether the Board extends it to Amazon will itself indicate the Board’s assessment of Amazon’s operational role. And 49 U.S.C. § 1154(b) bars admission of the Board’s probable cause determination in civil litigation, though factual reports are admissible. Litigants will therefore construct parallel records. The practical center of the civil case will be discovery over the transportation services agreement, the performance metric regime, and communications between Amazon’s network operations function and 21 Air’s flight followers.
12. Assessment: What Is Novel
Most of the structure is ordinary. Capacity purchase and ACMI arrangements are the industry standard, and brand-operator separation has characterized regional passenger aviation for forty years.
Three features are less familiar:
- Vertical integration without certification. The brand holder owns the metal and designs the network, compressing commercial and asset control into one uncertificated entity to a degree with few precedents outside the DHL–ABX arrangement DOT examined two decades ago.
- Foreign influence through the operational channel. Residual influence running through training and consulting rather than equity or financing does not map cleanly onto the actual-control doctrine as developed.
- Third-party ground harm. The victim profile activates a preemption regime — § 44112 read through Vreeland — that most aviation litigation never reaches, and it does so in the jurisdiction with the most developed case law on that provision.
The closest structural precedent is Colgan Air Flight 3407 in 2009, where brand-operator divergence in passenger service produced the Airline Safety and Federal Aviation Administration Extension Act of 2010, the first officer qualification rule, and a statutory requirement that passengers be told which carrier is actually operating their flight. The cargo analogue to that disclosure requirement does not exist, because there is no passenger to inform. Whether Congress concludes that the accountability gap it identified in 2010 has a cargo version is the open institutional question — and it is separable from anything the NTSB determines about this particular landing.
13. Conclusion
The Amazon–21 Air structure sits inside the legal boundaries as currently drawn. Its exposure arises not from any single unlawful element but from the fact that American aviation law allocates accountability to certificate holders, while economic reality has distributed the functions that generate risk across parties that hold no certificate. The proceedings ahead will test whether the doctrines built for a more integrated industry — operational control, owner liability, apparent agency, actual control, and preemption — are adequate to a structure in which brand, asset, and certificate are held by three different entities.
Notes
[^1]: Miami-Dade officials reported five fatalities and five injuries, with three of the injured in critical condition. NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy stated that the aircraft struck navigational aids and a van owned by a contract aircraft-cleaning company, with seven occupants aboard the van. The pilot and first officer were treated and released. See CNN (2026); CBS News Miami (2026).
[^2]: Amazon controls the aircraft and supplies them to 21 Air for operation on its behalf. See FreightWaves (2026a).
[^3]: 21 Air commenced Amazon flying in November 2024 with a single Amazon-supplied 767, operating Miami–Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky, as Amazon shifted domestic work from Atlas Air. It concurrently operated aircraft for DHL Express. See FreightWaves (2024).
[^4]: 21 Air is held by Avia Acquisitions, LLC, beneath Avia Investments, LLC. Cargojet acquired 25% in August 2021 and announced divestiture April 2, 2026. See Cargojet Inc. (2026); ch-aviation (2021).
[^5]: FreightWaves (2024).
[^6]: This exemption means that the party-with-operational-control designation required by § 91.23(a) for large civil aircraft leases is not generated here. The designation exists instead in operations specifications and in the private commercial agreement.
[^7]: FAA statements and contemporaneous reporting used both designations. See Global News (2026); Newsweek (2026).
[^8]: ALPA’s filing alleged that the two carriers shared at least one aircraft under an interchange arrangement resulting in a Canadian-registered aircraft flying wholly domestic U.S. routes, and requested that DOT proceed on the public docket. See Air Line Pilots Association, International (2021).
[^9]: See 21 Air, LLC (2021).
[^10]: Reporting attributed the February 2026 removal of chief executive Tim Strauss and installation of a former Cargojet executive to Cargojet influence, and noted that the situation was complicated by the rules governing foreign ownership and control of U.S. airlines. See FreightWaves (2026a).
[^11]: 21 Air’s operating fleet grew from eight to fifteen aircraft between late 2024 and early 2026. See FreightWaves (2026a).
References
21 Air, LLC. (2021). Answer of 21 Air, LLC (DOT Docket No. OST-2015-0043). U.S. Department of Transportation. https://downloads.regulations.gov/DOT-OST-2015-0043-0020/attachment_1.pdf
Abdullah v. American Airlines, Inc., 181 F.3d 363 (3d Cir. 1999).
Air Line Pilots Association, International. (2021). Petition for reconsideration (DOT Docket No. OST-2015-0044). U.S. Department of Transportation. https://downloads.regulations.gov/DOT-OST-2015-0044-0012/attachment_1.pdf
Air Cargo News. (2021, December). 21 Air dispute with pilot union rages on. https://www.aircargonews.net/people/2021/12/21-air-dispute-with-pilot-union-rages-on/
Airline Safety and Federal Aviation Administration Extension Act of 2010, Pub. L. No. 111-216, 124 Stat. 2348.
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Definitions and abbreviations, 14 C.F.R. § 1.1 (2024).
Duties of the pilot in command and the certificate holder in supplemental operations, 14 C.F.R. § 121.535 (2024).
Flight and duty limitations and rest requirements: Flightcrew members, 14 C.F.R. pt. 117 (2024).
FreightWaves. (2024, November 18). 21 Air makes debut cargo flight for Amazon. https://www.freightwaves.com/news/21-air-makes-debut-cargo-flight-for-amazon
FreightWaves. (2026a, April). Canada’s Cargojet plays role in CEO exit at Amazon partner 21 Air. https://www.freightwaves.com/news/canadas-cargojet-plays-role-in-ceo-exit-at-amazon-partner-21-air
FreightWaves. (2026b, April). 21 Air eyes larger Boeing 777s to access long-haul cargo market. https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/articles/21-air-eyes-larger-boeing-162431400.html
Global News. (2026, September 7). At least 5 dead after Amazon plane overruns runway at Miami airport. https://globalnews.ca/news/12049666/miami-airport-prime-air-plane-crash/
Indirect air transportation of property, 14 C.F.R. pt. 296 (2024).
Indirect air carrier security, 49 C.F.R. pt. 1548 (2024).
Limitation of liability, 49 U.S.C. § 44112 (2018).
Management personnel required for operations conducted under part 121 of this chapter, 14 C.F.R. § 119.65 (2024).
Newsweek. (2026, September 8). Miami Amazon plane crash audio reveals aftermath. https://www.newsweek.com/miami-prime-crash-audio-reveals-moments-after-plane-overran-runway-12411838
Preemption of authority over prices, routes, and service, 49 U.S.C. § 41713 (2018).
Requirement for a certificate, 49 U.S.C. § 41101 (2018).
Restatement (Second) of Torts §§ 411, 414, 429 (Am. L. Inst. 1965).
Sikkelee v. Precision Airmotive Corp., 822 F.3d 680 (3d Cir. 2016).
Sikkelee v. Precision Airmotive Corp., 907 F.3d 701 (3d Cir. 2018).
Truth-in-leasing clause requirement in leases and conditional sales contracts, 14 C.F.R. § 91.23 (2024).
United States citizen, 49 U.S.C. § 40102(a)(15) (2018).
Use of accident reports, 49 U.S.C. § 1154(b) (2018).
Vreeland v. Ferrer, 71 So. 3d 70 (Fla. 2011).
Wet leasing of aircraft and other arrangements for transportation by air, 14 C.F.R. § 119.53 (2024).
