“Statistically speaking, of course, it’s still the safest way to travel.” — Superman in Superman (1978)
Fly enough times and you’ll experience an aborted landing. I’ve experienced two or three. The first, in Minneapolis (1989?) in low-visibility conditions, resembled one this weekend.
Those who follow James Fallows’s newsletter know the veteran pilot follows aviation news closely. He reported recently on a Jan. 13 “runway incursion” at Kennedy Airport in New York. But over the weekend, two aircraft had an even closer call in Austin, Texas:
The short version of what happened is:
- The FedEx 767 was cleared for a “Cat III” landing, which means that the visibility is so bad that the pilots might not ever seen the runway until the plane’s advanced guidance system lets it automatically touch down.
- About 90 seconds before the 767 would have landed, the controllers in Austin cleared the Southwest 737 to roll onto that same runway, and begin their preparations for takeoff.
- At the last instant, the FedEx crew recognized what was about to happen. They warned Southwest over the radio; they aborted their landing; they headed off in one direction; and belatedly the controllers told Southwest to head the other way.
- At the closest, the descending FedEx plane came within about 150 feet of the Southwest plane, with its load of passengers. The FedEx crew’s awareness appears to have been the only thing that stood between this set-up and disaster.
“For perspective,” writes Fallows, “around the world some 100,000 airline flights take off and land safely every day.” So there’s that.
A graphical recreation follows:
A friend just earned her multi-engine rating, so I hear aviation chatter from her as well. What strikes me about this Austin incident was how much it resembled my experience in Minneapolis years ago.
Our aircraft was arriving from Seattle early that morning. Visibility was so low that nothing was visible until the plane dropped below the clouds barely a couple of hundred feet above ground. As the plane crossed the runway numbers at about 75 feet, we were so close to touching down that out the left side of the plane I could see another jet awaiting takeoff clearance. The pilots’ faces were visible.
Suddenly, our pilot gunned the engines and began climbing to go around. A departing aircraft had not yet cleared the runway ahead. Collisions are rare, but they do happen.
My uncle died in the Park Slope plane crash in December 1960 when a TWA Super Constellation and a United Airlines DC-8-11 from Chicago collided over New York City:
It was the accident pilots and passengers in the still-new jet age had feared the most — a distinctly new kind of catastrophe, one that had never happened over a major urban area, one that would have seemed far less terrifying a few years earlier, when planes were smaller and slower. Two airliners feeling their way through a sloppy mess of fog and sleet collided over New York City, sending down a devastating shower of flaming wreckage.
The DC-8 fell into the streets of Park Slope, Brooklyn. The Constellation crashed onto Staten Island. It’s a thing a kid tends to remember from the days when a Chicago newsroom had someone manually scroll a typed casualty list in front of a black-and-white TV camera.