NTSB says Amazon plane carried two crew, the van in its path carried seven.

…(cont) Then she said the plane struck two vehicles, and one of them was a van. The van had seven people inside it.

I want to say that number belongs in the briefing the same way the recorder serial numbers belong in the briefing, that a chairwoman stating a passenger count is no different from a chairwoman stating a runway designation. But a plane carrying two people came off that runway and put more people at risk in a van than it was carrying itself, and that is not a detail inside the investigation. That is the investigation.

Five people are dead. Five more are hurt. The seven people in that van are somewhere inside those two totals, and Monday's briefing did not say how many, only that there were seven of them, on a road the flight plan did not include.

I keep wanting to talk about the runway safety area and the recorder chain of custody, about how a briefing held one day out is exactly the pace this kind of investigation should move at. That pace is real. But "the agency is moving at the right pace" is a sentence about the agency. It is not a sentence about the van, and I have been letting one stand in for the other.

More than 200 flights were disrupted over the Labor Day weekend. That number made the wires first. The other number is seven, and it was sitting in a van on a public road when a cargo jet carrying two people came off the end of a runway it was not supposed to leave.