By David Kleczek · Kleczek Law Office · Oakland, California · Representing injured people since 2002

More than a minute before a Boeing 767 cargo jet touched down at Miami International Airport on September 6, 2026, one of its own pilots warned that the plane was coming in too fast. Electronic cockpit warnings followed. The crew continued the approach anyway.

By the time the wheels finally reached the runway, a process that itself took 11 seconds as the jet floated above the pavement, it was traveling at roughly 182 miles per hour. Over the next several seconds the crew wavered between slowing down and adding power to abort the landing, before committing to stopping. It was not enough. The freighter, loaded with 16 tons of cargo, ran 1,300 feet past the end of the runway, tore through airport property, and struck vehicles on a perimeter road.

Five people were killed. All five were inside a van used to shuttle aircraft-cleaning crews. Five more were injured, including both pilots.

The plane flew under the name “Prime Air Flight 7598” and wore Amazon’s colors. It was not, in any legal or operational sense, Amazon’s plane. Amazon does not hold an FAA air carrier certificate and has never operated an aircraft directly. The flight was operated by 21 Air, a charter cargo carrier working under contract, using an aircraft leased from a separate company.

When National Transportation Safety Board Chair Jennifer Homendy spoke to reporters, she made clear that the relationship between Amazon and its contracted carrier is now one of the central questions investigators are asking. She said regulators do not yet know whether Amazon evaluates the safety of the operators flying under its name at all.

That is not a rhetorical question. It is a legal one, and it has a real answer.

Can you sue Amazon for a delivery driver’s accident?

Often, yes. But not for the reason most people expect.

The instinct is to say Amazon should be responsible because it is Amazon’s name on the van. That argument, standing alone, usually loses. Amazon’s contracts are written specifically to place the driver on someone else’s payroll.

The argument that wins is different. It is that Amazon was careless in choosing the contractor in the first place, and in continuing to use it. That is a claim against Amazon in its own right, not a claim that Amazon inherited someone else’s mistake. Lawyers call it negligent selection, negligent hiring, or negligent retention.

Understanding the difference matters, because it changes what evidence your case needs.

Theory	What you must show	Why Amazon fights it
Vicarious liability (respondeat superior)	The driver was Amazon’s employee or agent	Amazon’s contracts are built to defeat this. It points to the contractor’s payroll.
Negligent selection or hiring	Amazon failed to reasonably investigate a contractor before trusting it with dangerous work	Requires Amazon to open its own vetting file. It resists that in discovery.
Negligent retention	Amazon kept using a contractor after learning it was unsafe	Amazon’s own monitoring data usually proves the knowledge. This is where cases are won.

Who is actually driving and flying under the Amazon name?

Amazon built its delivery network and its air cargo network the same way. Both use separately owned companies operating vehicles that carry Amazon’s brand.

On the ground, a rotating group of small, independently owned Delivery Service Partners, or DSPs, run vans painted with the Amazon logo. They drive routes Amazon designs, under performance metrics Amazon sets, while Amazon’s contracts label the drivers someone else’s employees. It is the same basic structure the rideshare companies use, and it raises the same question about who answers for the driver.

Amazon Flex is a third arrangement, and it is the easiest one to miss. Flex drivers deliver in their own personal vehicles, sign up through an app, and are treated as independent contractors rather than employees of any delivery company. After a crash that matters for a practical reason: the vehicle looks like an ordinary private car, so nothing at the scene connects it to Amazon. The insurance picture is different too. A personal auto policy may exclude commercial use, which can leave an injured person looking at Amazon’s own coverage and at the negligent-selection claim rather than at a commercial policy. If you were hit in Oakland by someone delivering packages in an unmarked car, say so early.

In the air, the arrangement is the same in structure. 21 Air is a Greensboro, North Carolina cargo carrier that grew quickly under the ownership of Jim Crane, who took a controlling stake in 2021. The airline now runs roughly 17 aircraft, eight of them flying for Amazon under a relationship that began less than two years ago. Its revenue reached $141 million last year, an 88% jump from the year before, according to aviation data provider Cirium. Crane has publicly described the appeal of the company in terms of how lean and fast-moving its management is, telling a trade publication that decisions happen with a couple of phone calls.

Former employees say that speed came with a cost. The airline’s first safety director under Crane’s ownership resigned after three months, writing in a June 2021 email that he found problems throughout the operation and that the company treated its federally required safety reporting program as a formality it did not act on.

A later whistleblower case, filed by the former president of 21 Air’s pilot union after he was fired in July 2022, produced testimony from the airline’s former chief pilot that he repeatedly raised safety concerns and was told not to file them in the official reporting system, and to take them to the CEO instead. The company and its former CEO dispute all of this. They testified that the reporting system worked properly and that no one was retaliated against. That case is still pending.

This is also not the first Amazon-branded cargo jet to go down. In February 2019 a Boeing 767 flown by Atlas Air for Amazon Air crashed into Trinity Bay outside Houston, killing all three people aboard. The NTSB attributed that crash primarily to pilot error. That makes two fatal crashes of Amazon-contracted freighters in seven years, flown by two different carriers, both traced at least in part to what happened in the cockpit.

Amazon’s public position is that its operating partners are certified by federal safety regulators, and that contracting out flight operations is standard practice in the cargo industry, comparable to how passenger airlines rely on regional carriers. That comparison has real force. Codeshare and regional carrier relationships are common and heavily regulated.

But it sidesteps the question the NTSB chair actually asked. Federal certification establishes a baseline. It does not tell you whether the company putting its brand and its cargo on that aircraft did anything beyond confirming the certificate existed. You can read more about the agency’s role in these investigations at the National Transportation Safety Board.

Proving negligent hiring of a carrier: the four-element test

Ordinarily a company that hires an independent contractor is not liable for the contractor’s mistakes. But there is a long-standing exception. It comes from Section 411 of the Restatement (Second) of Torts, and courts across the country apply it in trucking and freight-broker cases.

The rule is this. If a company fails to take reasonable care in choosing a contractor, it can be held directly liable for the harm that follows. That applies whenever the work is dangerous unless it is done carefully.

Courts applying this standard generally require proof of four things.

Element	What it means	What proves it
1. Foreseeable risk	The work is dangerous if done incompetently	Flying loaded cargo jets, or driving delivery vans through neighborhoods on a quota, plainly qualifies
2. The contractor was unfit	It lacked the training culture, staffing discipline, or safety practices a reasonable operator needs	Safety personnel resigning over ignored concerns, a chief pilot told not to file reports, a pending whistleblower case
3. Amazon knew or should have known	A reasonable investigation would have found the problem	The carrier-vetting file, the onboarding file, contract disclosure clauses, and what was in the public record
4. Causation	The specific deficiency caused this specific harm	Tying the NTSB’s findings about crew decision-making back to the documented safety-culture pattern

The third element is where these cases are made or lost. Courts have held that a company has a duty to actually investigate a contractor’s qualifications and safety history when its own business depends on that contractor working safely. Accepting a federal certificate at face value is not enough. Peachtree-Cain Co. v. McBee in Georgia, Puckrein v. ATI Transport in New Jersey, and Schramm v. Foster in Maryland all reflect that principle.

A federal whistleblower proceeding about a carrier’s safety culture is exactly the kind of thing a duty of inquiry is meant to catch. That proceeding was open and part of the public record while Amazon’s relationship with 21 Air expanded from a standing start to eight aircraft.

The fourth element is the one defendants fight hardest, and courts do sometimes reject these claims on causation even where a duty was breached. A plaintiff has to connect the specific deficiency to the specific failure.

So the case is not built by pointing at the crash and saying Amazon should have known. It is built out of documents. What was actually in Amazon’s vetting file? When did Amazon learn about the pending case? Did its contracts require the carrier to disclose open regulatory or labor proceedings? Did anyone look before handing that carrier more aircraft?

The NTSB chair has said publicly that nobody knows the answer yet. That is not a weakness in the theory. That is the discovery request.

What the Amazon delivery van verdicts already show

This is not theoretical. The same playbook has already produced some of the largest verdicts against Amazon in the country.

Case	What happened	Outcome
South Carolina	Amazon’s own required monitoring software had logged more than 90 instances of distracted driving by one delivery associate in five months before he struck a motorcyclist	Jury found Amazon grossly negligent in hiring, supervision, and retention. Roughly $44.6 million, including $30 million in punitive damages against Amazon
Massachusetts	Amazon initially insisted it bore no liability because the driver worked for an independent DSP, then reversed course days before trial	Amazon stipulated to liability, leaving the jury to decide damages only: $56 million
Georgia and Missouri (pending)	Claims that Amazon’s delivery-quota pressure created unsafe conditions, and that Amazon knew or should have known from the safety data it collects on every driver	Unresolved

The thread connecting all of them is the point the NTSB chair put her finger on for the aviation side. The company setting the pace and collecting the performance data is the company that can least credibly claim it did not know.

Amazon’s telematics, dash cameras, and app-based tracking generate precisely the safety record a negligent hiring or negligent retention claim needs. The question in every one of these cases is whether anyone acted on what that data showed.

That same question now applies to the carrier-oversight process behind Flight 7598. If you are dealing with a crash involving a commercial vehicle operating under a national brand, our Oakland truck accident practice and aviation accident practice both turn on this kind of corporate-structure work.

Where the insurance money actually comes from

One reason the contractor structure matters so much is that it determines which insurance policies are available to pay a claim. A serious injury or a death can easily exceed a single commercial auto policy. Identifying every responsible party early is what opens the additional layers, and that search is one of the first jobs of an Amazon delivery accident lawyer.

In a case involving a branded vehicle operated by a contractor, the potential sources typically include:

• The contractor’s own commercial liability coverage, which is usually the first policy identified and often the smallest.
• The driver’s personal coverage, where it applies.
• The brand’s own corporate coverage, reachable through a direct negligence claim against the brand rather than a claim passed through the contractor.
• The vehicle owner or lessor, which in the Miami case is a separate company from the operator.
• Your own underinsured motorist coverage, which can matter more than people expect.

Sorting this out is not paperwork. It is the difference between a claim capped by one policy and a claim that reflects what actually happened.

How long you have to file in California

Deadlines in these cases are short and unforgiving, and they vary depending on who the defendant turns out to be. That is one more reason the contractor question needs answering early.

Claim type	Deadline
Personal injury	2 years from the date of injury, under California Code of Civil Procedure § 335.1
Wrongful death	2 years from the date of death
Claim against a public entity	6 months from the date of the accident
Medical injury	3 years from the injury, or 1 year from discovery, whichever comes first

If a deadline passes, the right to compensation is generally gone regardless of how strong the case was.

What to do after a crash involving a branded delivery vehicle

1. Get medical attention. Go to the emergency room, your doctor, or a clinic as soon as possible. If needed, call an ambulance to the scene.
2. Photograph everything, including the branding. Get the logo, the vehicle number, the license plate, and any contractor name printed on the door. That contractor name is frequently the only clue to who actually operated the vehicle.
3. Do not discuss the case. Speak about your injuries with your doctor and your attorney. Do not admit fault or apologize. Do not give a statement to an insurance representative without your attorney present.
4. Keep every document. Medical records, police reports, witness contact information, and photos of the scene and your injuries. Write down what happened while it is fresh.
5. Call a lawyer quickly. Electronic evidence in these cases, including telematics and camera footage, is controlled by the companies involved and is not preserved forever. A preservation demand needs to go out early, and an Amazon delivery accident lawyer can send one within days.

When to call an Amazon delivery accident lawyer in Oakland

The company named on the side of the plane or the van will argue, correctly as a matter of paperwork, that it is not the proper defendant. Getting past that argument, and proving negligent selection or retention rather than simply asserting it, takes work that has to start early:

• Preserving evidence before it disappears. Data and voice recorders, dispatch and training records, telematics, camera footage, and contract terms.
• Subpoenaing the vetting file itself. What the brand knew, when it knew it, and what it did about it.
• Retaining the right experts. Aviation or trucking safety specialists, and corporate-structure and insurance analysts who can translate that file into a case a jury can follow.
• Litigating against a company with the resources to make every discovery request a fight, and the incentive to settle quietly once the file starts looking bad.

For a family dealing with a catastrophic injury or a wrongful death, this is not a case that resolves with a call to an insurance adjuster. It is a fight against a structure built so that the deepest pocket in the room never has to open on its own. The South Carolina and Massachusetts results show that fight is winnable, but only with the persistence to get past the name on the vehicle and into the file behind it.

Frequently asked questions

Can I sue Amazon if one of their delivery drivers hit my car?

Often yes, but usually not on the theory that the driver was Amazon’s employee. Amazon’s contracts place delivery drivers on a Delivery Service Partner’s payroll. The stronger claim is that Amazon was negligent in selecting or continuing to use that contractor, which is a direct claim against Amazon itself. You may also have claims against the DSP, the driver, and the vehicle’s owner.

Who is liable in an Amazon delivery accident?

Liability is usually shared among several parties: the driver, the Delivery Service Partner that employed the driver, the owner or lessor of the vehicle, and in many cases Amazon itself. Amazon’s liability generally rests on how it chose and monitored the contractor, not on the branding of the van. Identifying every party matters because each one may carry separate insurance.

How much does Amazon pay if they hit you?

There is no set amount. Compensation depends on the severity of the injuries, medical costs, lost income, and the long-term effect on your life, as well as how many insurance policies apply. Reported outcomes in delivery cases range from routine policy-limit settlements to jury verdicts of $44.6 million and $56 million where a jury found the company itself at fault. Past results do not guarantee any particular outcome in your case.

Can I sue Amazon for pain and suffering?

Yes. Pain and suffering are recoverable in a California personal injury claim as non-economic damages, alongside medical bills and lost income. There is no fixed formula. The value depends on how serious the injury is, how long recovery takes, and how much it changes your daily life. Insurers routinely undervalue this category, which is one reason early settlement offers tend to be low.

What if an Amazon Flex driver hit me?

Amazon Flex drivers use their own vehicles and are treated as independent contractors, so nothing about the car identifies it as a delivery vehicle. Tell your attorney if the driver mentioned delivering packages, had parcels or delivery totes in the car, or was using a delivery app. Flex cases often turn on whether a personal auto policy excludes commercial use, which changes which insurance layers are available and makes the direct claim against Amazon more important.

Do I need a lawyer to sue Amazon?

For a minor property damage claim, probably not. For a serious injury or a death, yes. These cases turn on internal corporate records that are only obtainable through formal discovery, on evidence that must be preserved before it is deleted, and on identifying defendants that are deliberately hard to see. An unrepresented claimant is negotiating against a company with the resources to litigate for years.

What is negligent hiring?

Negligent hiring is a claim that a company failed to use reasonable care when selecting someone to perform work that is dangerous if done badly. If a reasonable investigation would have revealed that the contractor or employee was unfit, and someone is hurt as a result, the company that made the choice can be held directly responsible for its own carelessness. Negligent retention is the related claim that a company kept using someone after learning they were unsafe.

How long do I have to file an Amazon delivery accident claim in California?

Generally two years from the date of the injury for a personal injury claim, and two years from the date of death for a wrongful death claim. If a public entity is involved, the deadline can be as short as six months. Because these cases often involve several defendants with different deadlines, the safest step is to have the claim evaluated well before any deadline approaches.