Close call, turbulent flight add to aviation safety concerns

Federal officials have begun investigating a close call between planes in Boston, and they provided new details Thursday about a harrowing incident at an airport in Texas.

The National Transportation Safety Board said it has not determined exactly how close a FedEx cargo plane passed over the top of a Southwest Airlines jet last month in Austin, Texas, but there was little margin.

“We still believe the planes were within 100 feet of each other,” NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy said in an interview.

An air traffic controller had cleared both planes to use the same runway, the NTSB said in a preliminary report. The FedEx pilots pulled up at the last second to avoid a collision.

The NTSB is also investigating an incident Monday night at Boston's Logan International Airport in which a Learjet pilot who was told by an air traffic controller to wait instead began to take off as a JetBlue plane approached to land on an intersecting runway. The JetBlue pilots pulled up, avoiding a collision.

Those and similar incidents in New York, California and Hawaii led the head of the Federal Aviation Administration to call for a “safety summit” and ignited a debate about whether air safety is declining or the events are just an unusual cluster of serious close calls.

“I don't know that I can say that it's a trend, but these are disturbing because it just takes one,” Homendy said. “That is why we investigate incidents — so that we can identify problems, especially when we see trends, and address them before they become a full-blown accident.”