When a passenger jet was on its way to taking off at the Laguardia airport in New York, earlier this month had to hit the brakes because another plane was still on the runway, Renee Hoffer and all other passengers were thrown forward in their seats.
Hoffer ended up in the first aid the next day after the almost Miss on May 6, because her neck started to hurt and her left arm became numb.
“The stop was as hard as a car accident I have been to,” said Hoffer.
Both the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board said on Monday that they were investigating the incident in which a Republic Airways Jet had to break down and stop because an aircraft from United Airlines still had to go over the runway taxite. The narrow call happened despite the fact that the airport is equipped with an advanced surface radar system that is designed to prevent such close calls.
In Audio van de Toren that ABC has obtained from the website www.liveatc.net, the air traffic controller said to the pilot of the Republic Airways Jet: “Sorry, I thought United had cleared well for that.”
The moment the controller led the Republic Airways Jet to taking off, a land controller led the United plane to a new taxiway on another radio frequency after it had missed the first to use it to leave the runway.
When the passengers got off the plane at 12:35 pm after the close call, Hoffer said the gate agents even refused to give them hotel vouchers for the night because they blamed it again, although another passenger said she had an app on her phone that showed that there was another plane on the track.
Hoffer said that she was stuck in a nightmare of customer service since the flight republic for American Airlines had finally ended. She said that neither the airline nor the FAA has answered its complaints while she continues to take care of the pinched nerve in her neck that the doctors identified.
Both the airlines and the airport referred ask to the FAA.
The number of close calls in recent years has caused serious worries for the FAA, NTSB and other safety experts. The NTSB investigation into a close call in February 2023 in Austin emphasized the worries, but there have been a number of other controversial near-missers. In one case, a Southwest Airlines -Jet came in for a landing in Chicago barely to a business jet that crossed the runway.
Laguardia is one of only 35 airports equipped throughout the country with the best technology of the FAA to prevent such catwalk intensions. The ASDS-X system uses a variety of technology to help controllers follow aircraft and vehicles on the ground. At the other 490 American airports with a control tower, air traffic controllers must rely on more LowTech tools such as a few binoculars to keep track of aircraft on the ground because the systems are expensive.
Expanding the systems to more airports is something that transport secretary Sean Duffy would like to do if the congress unsubscribes its multi-billion dollar plan to revise the aging air traffic system of the nation.
But it is clear that the technology is not perfect because close calls continue to happen. De FAA takes a number of extra steps to try to reduce the number of close calls and it is planning to install an additional warning system at Laguardia in the future.
But the speed of catwalkin trap per 1 million starts and landings has remained around 30 for a decade. The speed became up to 35 in 2017 and 2018. But in general there are less than 20 of the most serious types of raids where a collision was closely avoided whether there was a significant potential for a crash, according to the FAA. That number reached 22 in 2023 but fell to only 7 last year.
To help, there are efforts to develop a system that will directly warn pilots of traffic on a runway instead of warning the controller and trusting it to pass on the warning. That can save costly seconds. But the FAA has not yet certified a system to directly warn pilots that Honeywell International has been developing for years.
The worst accident in aviation history took place in 1977 on the Spanish island of Tenerife, when a KLM 747 started his starting roll while a pan of am 747 was still on the runway; 583 people died when the planes collided in thick fog.
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