Reagan National Airport Narrowly Averts Mid-Air Collision of Three Commuter Jets
Three commuter jets came within seconds of a midair
collision at Reagan National Airport on Tuesday after confused air traffic
controllers launched two outbound flights directly at another plane coming in
to land, according to federal officials with direct knowledge of the incident.
The three planes, all operated by US Airways, carried 192
passengers and crew members, the airline said. All of the flights reached their
destinations without mishap, but the near miss was another among several
thousand recorded errors by air traffic controllers nationwide in recent years.
National has been the site of some of the most notable
incidents, including one revealed last year in which the lone controller
supervisor on duty was asleep and didn’t respond when regional controllers
sought to hand off planes to National for the final approach.
The problem Tuesday occurred about 2 p.m. as a number of
inbound planes were queued up to turn above Mount Vernon, fly north over the
Potomac River and land on National’s main runway. But an approaching storm
caused a significant wind shift, and the air traffic control center in
Warrenton wanted to reverse the flow of planes into the airport, turning them
north of Rosslyn and routing them south along the river to land from the
opposite direction.
The Warrenton controllers communicated the plan to the
controller tower at National.
“The tower agreed, but they didn’t pass it on to all the
people they needed to pass it on to,” said a federal official familiar with the
incident who was not authorized to speak publicly.
As a result, an incoming flight that had been cleared to
land was flying head-on at two planes that had just taken off. The inbound
plane and the first of the outbound planes were closing the 1.4 miles between
them at a combined speed of 436 mph, a rate that meant they were about 12
seconds from impact when the tower controller recognized her mistake.
“Are you with me?” the tower controller asked the inbound
pilot, checking to see whether he was tuned to her radio frequency. When the
pilot acknowledged her, she ordered him to make an abrupt turn to the south to
avoid the other two planes.
“We were cleared [for landing] at the river there,” the
pilot said after breaking off the approach northwest of the airport. “What
happened?”
After a pause, the controller said, “Stand by, we’re
trying to figure this out.”
As she directed him to make a loop around the airport for
a second landing attempt the pilot cautioned: “We really don’t have enough fuel
here for this. We have to get on the ground pretty quick.”
The federal official who reviewed the incident said what
appeared to be a basic failure to communicate the planned change to everyone in
the National tower was compounded by sloppy procedures.
“This is a pretty big screw-up for a major airport,” the
person said.
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