Ex-pilots for cargo company in MIA crash had concerns about safety: documents

Miami-Dade County admin September 9, 2026 0 Comments

Ex-pilots for cargo company in MIA crash had concerns about safety: documents

A former pilot for the air-cargo company that operated the Amazon Prime jet that overran a runway at Miami International Airport on Sunday, killing five people in vehicles, accused his former employer of firing him for bringing to light concerns over flight safety, according to documents related to a whistleblower complaint that he filed.

In sworn statements in an ongoing Department of Labor dispute with his former employer, pilot Karl Seuring and his attorney accuse North Carolina-based 21 Air of not giving pilots enough time off between flights, violating takeoff-speed protocols and other issues that put crews and the public at risk.

And another former pilot resigned from 21 Air in June 2021 after he felt significant safety issues were being ignored by management.

“After three months, everywhere I looked, there are issues,” Don Helmig, a retired airline and military pilot, wrote in a June 12, 2021, resignation email to 21 Air’s majority owner, Jim Crane, who also owns the Houston Astros baseball team.

“In my opinion, what they wished me to do is say nothing, but that is not how Safety is supposed to operate, to ‘pay lip service to [Safety Management Systems}’ and do nothing,” Helmig said in the email, which was obtained by the Miami Herald.

In the transcripts for a March 25, 2024, Labor Department tribunal in front of an administrative-law judge, Seuring’s attorney, Michael Anello, said that when Seuring joined 21 Air, he noticed that the pre-flight checklist was “unreasonably long such that it implicated safety.”

“He believed that operation under that checklist made it more likely that that airplane using that list would suffer an accident, some type of tragic event,” Anello said.

Anello also said 21 Air pilots were “being pressured to fly in periods of time that were too short to comply with the proper amounts of rest and this implicated safety. The layovers were too short. The management was pushing the pilots and the result was he was retaliated against by one of his supervisors.”

When Seuring noticed these and other alleged deficiencies in 21 Air’s flying protocols, he raised those concerns verbally and in emails with other pilots in the company. Seuring later became head of the pilots’ union at the firm but roughly three hours after he sent an email mentioning a labor attorney, he was fired.

“His decision to raise safety issues was a factor in his firing,” Anello said.

21 Air denied the allegation. The company’s attorney, Chris Harrison, told the judge that Seuring was fired because he had lied about his employment history. Seuring, Harrison alleged, lied on his application to 21 Air about why he was terminated from Delta Airlines. Seuring said when applying he was retaliated against for airing safety concerns, but Harrison told the judge Delta let him go for cause.

“He’s misleading people into thinking he’s some kind of a hero. He’s a fraud,” Harrison said. “He did it at Delta, and he continues to do it today.”

Seuring, who began his flying career in 1979, did not immediately respond to the Herald’s request for comments.

Harrison and another attorney representing 21 Air in the Labor complaint also did not immediately respond to the Miami Herald’s requests for comments.

Another allegation that Seuring levied against 21 Air regarded a flight that he was on to Bermuda. Suering told the judge he was on the plane as an observer, according to the transcripts.

He alleged that the pilot and co-pilot exceeded the flap speeds during takeoff. But after the plane reached a safe altitude, instead of discussing it and acknowledging the error — as Seuring said protocol typically suggests — there was no discussion or debrief between the pilots, he told the judge.

“I was concerned for my own safety sitting in the cockpit based on what I saw,” Seuring told the judge. “It wasn’t the exceedance [of flap speed] that bothered me the most. It was the breakdown of communication.”

Another former 21 Air chief pilot, Bruce Joseph, testified to the tribunal that at least three pilots had refused to fly due to safety concerns.

He also said 21 Air’s executives discouraged logging safety concerns in the company system “on numerous occasions.”

This is a developing story and will be updated.

This story was originally published September 8, 2026 at 7:44 PM.