Photo: AFP
On Monday, a pair of airliners nearly flew into each other as they approached JFK Airport for landing. Jazz Aviation Flight 554 and Republic Airways Flight 4464 came within 350 feet of each other before one plane swerved out of the way, avoiding a potential mid-air collision. The planes were eventually able to land safely, and the FAA is investigating. That near-miss comes one month after a fire truck collided with an Air Canada airliner as it drove across a runway responding to an incident at LaGuardia Airport. It does raise the question of how concerned flyers ought to be with the nation’s air traffic controllers as summer travel season approaches. John Nance is the ABC World News aviation analyst and a veteran pilot; he appeared on 710 WOR’s Curti Sliwa and Larry Mendte in the Morning program to break down the circumstances that nearly broke down in the skies over JFK.
Nance summed up what was occurring In the cockpits of the two planes as air traffic control tried to guide the planes into JFK: “Well, we had in one instance a pilot who kind of slid a little bit too far to one side on his approach and was getting too close to the other airliner. The cockpit of both of these airliners have got a thing called T-Cash, which is ‘Traffic Collision Avoidance System’, and those were both going off, but it was a serious close call, and one that, if things had been a little bit different, might have turned out badly.”
Nance says the occurrence of two incidents so close together suggests two areas investigators can possibly look to prevent this from happening again: “First of all, air traffic control, the circumstances in which the air traffic controllers are working; are they too tired? We’ve had a tremendous amount of pressure and had insufficient staffing for a very long time, and so that’s where you want to look and see if you can connect the dots. The second part, though, is we expect air traffic controllers to be 100% perfect 100% of the time- that has always been a fallacy because they are human beings.”
Photo Credit: Getty Images