RAF plane 150ft from disaster in near-miss with US fighters

AN RAF tanker aircraft came within 150ft of a catastrophic mid-air collision with two US Air Force fighters over the North Sea while a flight controller was making a phone call, an official report has revealed.

The pilots of the RAF Voyager reported feeling the turbulence from the afterburner the pilot of one of the F-15s switched on to avoid a crash. One immediately reported the incident, over The Wash, to flight controllers, saying he and his crew were ‘very close to not being here any more’.

A report by the UK Airprox Board, which investigates near-misses, said a misunderstanding between the US pilots and a controller at Swanwick, Hampshire, led to the incident.

He was confused over the location of the F-15s from RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk, thinking they were flying south of the zone in which the Voyager, based at Brize Norton in Oxfordshire and carrying a crew of 11, had just finished refuelling two RAF Typhoons. Believing the aircraft were in different areas, he answered a call on a phone that was not his responsibility and became embroiled in a complicated conversation, the report says.

A trainee controller said the incident on January 5 ‘escalated rapidly’, leaving her no time to instruct the tanker to take evasive action. The aircraft passed each other at 16,000ft ten miles off Norfolk. One F-15 pilot described selecting ‘maximum afterburner’ to avoid a collision. The report classed the incident as the most serious Category A near-miss. Luck ‘played a major part’ in avoiding disaster, it said.