Investigators with the National Transportation Safety Board said at a hearing on last year’s incident at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport that inadequate training and a lack of critical safety technology were also factors. Had up-to-date technology been installed at the airport, it could have helped the controller track the position of traffic, particularly when visibility is limited, as it was the day of the incident, the agency said.
“We had two aircraft come within less than 200 feet of each other and this should not have happened,” board member Michael Graham said. “I am glad we are talking about a near miss today. There could have been another result and we could be talking about a tragedy.”
The Feb. 4, 2023, incident in Austin was one of more than a half a dozen serious episodes that drew the attention of federal regulators and prompted the Federal Aviation Administration to convene a safety summit aimed at understanding the sudden spike in what is known in the industry as runway incursions. At least six of the most serious incidents happened during the first two months of 2023.
Details from the Austin scare show just how close the two planes came to colliding in the early-morning hours of that foggy day. Investigators said the FedEx crew was preparing to land when the first officer spotted the Southwest Airlines passenger jet below it.
In response, the FedEx pilots pulled up and circled to avoid the jet. Investigators said the belly of the FedEx jet came less than 200 feet from the tail of the Southwest Airlines plane. While no one was injured, the Federal Aviation Administration classified the incident as a Category A, the most serious on its rating scale.
The controller told investigators that in his experience, Southwest’s pilots tend to move quickly, and so he thought there would be enough time for the flight to depart before the FedEx plane landed. However, he said, when he didn’t hear the 737’s engines indicating that the plane was taking off, he realized something was wrong. Investigators said that visibility was limited on the ground and that once the FedEx cargo jet dropped below 800 feet it no longer appeared on radar, so the controller may have lost his sense of where the planes were positioned.
As part of their final report to be published in a few weeks, the NTSB will issue seven recommendations to the FAA. Those include improving communication between pilots and air traffic controllers and requiring initial and refresher training for air traffic controllers on how to handle airport operations when visibility is limited.
Board members also reiterated their call for the FAA to accelerate installation of technology that will prevent collisions, a recommendation they first made more than two decades ago. While many U.S. airports have technology in place to warn controllers of potential conflicts, Austin did not. NTSB members also said aircraft should be equipped with similar alert systems.
Jennifer Homendy, chair of the NTSB, said that too often, agencies base their cost-benefit analysis on risk assessments from accidents in which serious injuries or deaths have occurred. She said that agencies such as the FAA must be more proactive when it comes to safety.
“The FAA has to be able to figure out how to address the risk based on what could have happened, not just based on sort of this tombstone mentality as my old boss used to call it. We can’t only act after the fact, after people die,” she said.
In response to the rash of incidents, FAA officials launched an internal review of safety data and convened a safety summit in March 2023. The NTSB convened a separate meeting on the issue that May and launched investigations into seven of the most serious incidents, including the one in Austin.
The issue, however, remained top of mind for lawmakers. At a hearing in November, Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), chair of the Senate Commerce aviation subcommittee, said such incidents were a sign of a system under stress.
The FAA said in a statement that it recognizes the important role the NTSB plays in enhancing safety and that it will carefully review its recommendations. The agency noted that the rate of serious runway incursion in the first three months of 2024 decreased by 59 percent from the same period in 2023, from 0.56 per 1 million airport operations to 0.23 per 1 million operations.
Yet even while the number of serious incidents appears to be on the decline, two recent near misses that occurred weeks apart at Reagan National Airport serve to underscore that airport close calls remain a concern.
