"We'd Like to Delay": ABX Air 5103's Unhurried Emergency Over Miami

An ABX Air cargo crew declared an emergency just after midnight over Miami for an engine that, by their own account, was running fine — it was the instrument telling them otherwise that couldn't be trusted — and then, with more than four hours of fuel in the tanks, asked for something unusual: time, not an immediate landing.

A Sensor Problem, Not an Engine Problem

Barely through 2,400 feet after departing Miami, the crew called departure control to flag trouble with the right engine. The controller's first question was the obvious one: "Did you lose an engine?" The answer wasn't what that question usually gets. The engine, the crew said, appeared to be running perfectly normally — it was the N1 sensor, the instrument that reads engine fan/compressor speed, showing fluctuations of up to 20 percent, making the engine appear to roll back in thrust and then recover, when nothing about the engine's actual performance seemed to be doing that.

Declaring Anyway

Despite believing the engine itself was fine, the crew declared an emergency — the appropriate call when an instrument you rely on to manage engine health is behaving erratically, whether or not the underlying system turns out to be the actual problem. They reported two souls on board, 45,000 pounds of fuel, and four and a half hours of endurance — numbers that, unlike most declared emergencies in this archive, describe a crew with time to spare rather than a clock running down.

Asking for Time Instead of a Runway

Rather than request an immediate return, the crew used that fuel margin deliberately: "We would like to delay and make sure we run through our checklist and procedures." That's a crew choosing to diagnose carefully over landing fast, a choice only available because they had the fuel to afford it.

A Controller Who Matched the Pace

The controller's response set the tone for how well this exchange went: he'd hold them in the downwind west of the field for as long as they needed, and the moment they were ready, he'd turn them straight in. The crew took him up on it, adding one request of their own — that he call them if they seemed to be drifting too far out, so a slow, careful troubleshooting process didn't turn into a navigation problem on top of the original one.

This reconstruction was researched from official investigation records where they exist, the original air traffic control recording, and contemporary reporting. The aircraft movement, timeline and written account were assembled independently by Flight Follower. Where an investigation is open or no probable cause has been published, the account says so rather than offering one.

Timeline

Accident Facts

Sources

• Account built from the ATC recording. No independent news coverage of this specific flight was located.