A Vancouver-bound flight came close to colliding with another plane at a Houston airport earlier this month, according to the Federal Aviation Administration.
The incident occurred on May 9, just 1.6 kilometres away from Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport, as Vancouver, B.C.-bound United Airlines flight 601 and another United flight 437, headed for Mexico City, came within very close proximity. While the horizontal distance between the two planes was 1.4 kilometres, they came even closer vertically. The two airliners were separated by a distance nearly the same length of a Canadian football field: just 120 metres.
The near-collision is under investigation by the Federal Aviation Administration in the United States.
An air traffic controller told the Vancouver-bound flight to turn right after takeoff, the FAA said in a statement to CTVNews.ca on Friday. That put it in the path of the Mexico-bound flight. Controllers then issued new instructions to separate the two aircraft before a collision occurred, the FAA said.
After the incident, pilots from the two aircraft can be heard discussing the near-miss on the air traffic control channel.
“United 601, you know what happened there?” one pilot is heard asking in the recording released by LiveATC.net.
“You all basically crossed directly over the top of each other, that’s what it looked like from my perspective,” a second pilot says. “I have no idea what was going on up there in the tower, but it was pretty gnarly-looking.”
“Both United aircraft were operating in compliance with their Air Traffic clearances,” a United Airlines representative said in an email to CTVNews.ca.
The FAA, which governs air traffic controller training, said it promotes a "non-punitive safety culture" among its employees and encourages them to identify safety issues.
"The FAA fully analyzes every identified loss of the required separation between aircraft and develops corrective actions to prevent similar events from occurring in the future," a spokesperson for the FAA said in a statement on Friday.
"The FAA builds robust safety margins into the air traffic system and relies on a series of other safety layers to achieve that high level of safety."
Multiple near-collisions have been reported in recent weeks. On April 24, another United Airlines flight was involved in a near-collision with an ExpressFlight jet at Newark Liberty Airport. A day later, two more United planes nearly collided over the Pacific Ocean.
But Edward McKeogh president of the Canadian Aviation Safety Consultants, said these near-collisions are rare, “and usually the result of someone making an understandable human error usually at controller side or pilot side.”
The FAA said it sees no trend or similarities between these and other individual occurrences, but it is considering whether the large number of retiring air traffic controllers is a contributing factor.
Infographics:
Every year, there are approximately 6 million flights across the country. From 2004 to 2012, there were approximately 1,500 “risk of collision” or “loss of separation” incidents, according to the Transportation Safety Board of Canada.
