(NewsNation) — The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is urgently calling on the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to make changes, including installing runway technology to help avoid the near collisions surging in the past few years.
The NTSB met Thursday to finalize the causes of a staggering near crash from February 2023 in Austin, where a FedEx plane almost landed on top of a Southwest Airlines plane that was cleared for takeoff.
At one point, the planes were 150 feet away.
It could have spelled catastrophe for 131 people onboard, but the FedEx plane aborted landing, and no one was hurt.
The likely cause appears to be a lack of training and foggy conditions that blocked an air traffic controller’s view of where the Southwest plane was on the runway.
That’s not the only near collision, however.
There were 971 runway incursions in fiscal year 2024 — up 6% from 919 in 2023.
Additionally, in February 2023, a corporate jet took off without permission at Boston Logan International Airport.
A picture from the cockpit of a JetBlue flight coming in to land shows just how close they were to the smaller plane. Fortunately, they avoided a crash.
At Houston’s William P. Hobby Airport, two private jets struck each other when a pilot thought he had been cleared for takeoff but was told to wait.
“Alarming as they are, events like this are rare,” NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy said. “But the somber truth is it only takes one…Bottom line: We’re trending in the wrong direction.”
An FAA bill that just passed has funds for runway tech that the NTSB recommends for airports.
Experts have been calling attention to fatigue and staff shortages among air traffic controllers and pilots.