Close calls start to spark concern on aviation safety

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. With visibility down to a quarter-mile because of freezing fog, the FedEx pilots didn’t see the Southwest jet until the last seconds.

The NTSB also is 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.”

Among the other recent incidents now being investigated:

• Last week, pilots of a small airliner aborted their landing in Burbank after a controller cleared another plane to take off from the same runway.

• A United Airlines jet crossed a runway at Honolulu International Airport in front of a Cessna cargo plane that was landing on the same runway Jan. 23.

• The NTSB took the rare step of issuing subpoenas for pilots of an American Airlines plane that crossed a runway that a Delta Air Lines jet was using to take off Jan. 13 at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport.

The American pilots initially refused to sit for recorded interviews, but they complied after getting subpoenas, Homendy said.

• Federal officials are taking another look at an incident in which a United Airlines jet taking off from Hawaii dove to within 800 feet of the ocean before recovering. United says pilots of the December flight are getting additional training.