JFK airport: Factors influencing American Airlines, Delta near-collision, as revealed in documents | CNN

CNN
 — 

An American Airlines flight’s pilots were caught off guard by paperwork and mistakenly crossed paths with a departing Delta flight at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport. This caused alarms in the control tower, triggering an urgent request to “cancel takeoff clearance” from the air traffic controller.

“My hands are shaking, I’m in shock, like— what the f***, what just happened,” the controller who prevented the potential collision expressed to investigators after the event.

These newly released details of the close call on the night of January 13, 2023, were found in National Transportation Safety Board documents made public on Monday.

This case marked the beginning of a series of serious near-collisions involving commercial and noncommercial flights on or near major US airport runways. In 2023, the NTSB initiated investigations into over seven such cases, formally known as runway incursions. In the JFK incident, the NTSB indicates that the two planes came within 1,400 feet of colliding.

Inside the American Airlines Boeing 777, with 149 people bound for London, the crew was reportedly dealing with weather bulletins and paperwork issues, as per the recently released NTSB documents. There was a third pilot onboard assisting, so the captain chose not to park the aircraft while last-minute work was being completed.

The experienced captain, with over 20,000 hours of flight experience, informed investigators that air traffic controllers revised their instructions and directed the plane to depart from a different runway. However, while taxiing, he mistakenly crossed JFK’s runway 4 Left while thinking about his original instructions.

He told investigators that he activated extra lighting around the aircraft before entering the runway, a practice he typically followed in dark conditions, as indicated in a transcript of his interview.

The crew of the Delta Air Lines Boeing 737, with 159 people onboard, did not see the larger American plane crossing their path. The captain mentioned to investigators that they heard the urgent instruction from air traffic controllers to abort the takeoff run.

“Due to the extreme darkness of the evening, it was not until we began decelerating that I saw the American Airlines 777 crossing the runway in front of us,” wrote the Delta captain in a statement.

When the American captain parked the plane on the other side of the runway and conversed with air traffic controllers, he was unaware of how close he had come to disaster.

“I still thought I was in the right, that somehow, you know, somebody else messed up,” the captain shared with NTSB investigators in a transcribed interview. “From where we were sitting looking back, it didn’t look like we were close to anybody at all. So, I didn’t know there was anybody taking off on that runway.”

Four air traffic controllers in the tower cab were interviewed by the NTSB on the night of the incident. As automated collision warning alarms sounded in the tower, the tower supervisor shouted to the controller making radio transmissions to instruct the Delta flight to “cancel takeoff clearance,” one controller informed investigators.

“We had a really good team upstairs that night,” said the controller who announced the crucial abort transmission, “a really good team.”

The crew of the American Airlines flight mentioned to investigators in separate interviews that lights warning them against crossing the runway did not turn on until after they had already entered the runway. CNN reported soon after the incident that airport employees went out to check the lights immediately after the incident and found them in working order.

When the lights turned red, “we realized something wasn’t right,” the first officer of the American flight expressed during an interview.

While the captain was taxiing, the first officer stated she was occupied with an unusually large number of weather-related messages from company dispatchers, as well as a new procedure requiring her to make an announcement to passengers before takeoff.

“It was very unusual,” she said of the heavy volume of weather messages. “I had never seen that before.”

Author: OpenAI