The Daily: Passenger Planes Nearly Collide Far More Than You Know

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From New York Times, I'm Michael Barrow.

This is The Daily.

Today, a Times investigation has found that US passenger planes

come dangerously close to crashing into each other.

Far more frequently than the public knows.

My colleague, Cindy Ember, explains why an aviation system

known for its safety is producing such a steady stream

of close calls.

It's Tuesday, September 5th.

Cindy, tell us how this investigation started for you.

So you might remember back in the winter,

travel for passengers became a total nightmare.

Southwest had a meltdown, and then a couple of weeks later,

there was a system failure at the Federal Aviation

Administration.

And this led to lots of delays, lots of cancellations,

and thousands of passengers were stranded.

They were livid, Congress was mad.

And our editor came to us and essentially said,

go figure out why air travel is so annoying.

Right, and seemingly so broken.

And seemingly so broken.

And so we started talking to people in the aviation industry.

We started talking to people who worked at airlines, pilots.

We started talking to air traffic controllers.

Really, anyone we could think of who

might be able to explain this to us.

And what they started saying was, actually,

there is a more important story here to tell,

and it's about safety.

The safety system underlying aviation, underlying safety

for planes and passengers is under tremendous stress.

And at the same time, we started seeing a spate

of public near misses.

And these were near collisions between two planes

that were occurring generally around or at airports.

A terrifying near miss between two passenger planes

on the runway at New York's JFK airport.

There was one incident in mid-January at JFK.

Delta 1943 canceled takeoff plans.

An American Airlines plane made a wrong turn

and crossed a runway as a Delta plane was taking off.

But you could feel a jolt as the brakes activated.

Several weeks later, in Austin, an airport crisis

caught just in time.

A FedEx plane was cleared to land as a Southwest plane

was cleared to take off.

Just seconds away from disaster,

the FedEx pilots initiated what is called a go around.

There were other incidents in Sarasota, one in Boston.

It was just the latest instance of a close call

at an airport, leaving many wondering what's going on.

It was just a whole slew of incidents

that directed attention on whether aviation flying,

as we know it, is safe.

Right, so it sounds like just as people

in the industry are telling you,

hey, there's a safety problem, focus on that,

that you can't not focus on it

because these incidents are starting to happen.

So what did you do next?

Oh man, we continue to talk to people

and we started asking them,

are these incidents that have been occurring

across the country, are there more of them

than we know about and also what's causing them?

And what they told us was there is no real

authoritative comprehensive source

that shows how many commercial planes

are coming into these near collisions.

And so what I started doing with my colleague,

Emily Steele, was digging around and trying to figure out

if we could identify close calls

that hadn't been publicly reported

or that most of the public wouldn't know about.

So we started combing through public databases,

including one maintained by NASA

that have reports by pilots, air traffic controllers,

really anyone involved in aviation

about any safety issues, including close calls.

And eventually we were also able to gain access

to these safety reports that detail incidents

across the country that are distributed

to a select group of employees

at the Federal Aviation Administration.

And so putting all of this together,

these safety reports, these public databases,

a picture started to emerge of a lot more close calls

than almost anyone realizes are happening,

occurring extremely frequently,

really alarmingly frequently.

Well, what do you mean?

Just how frequently, just how alarmingly frequently

did you find based on all this data

that these close calls are happening?

So using these safety reports and these other databases,

what we found was this was happening multiple times

on average every week.

And we looked at July, for example,

and we saw at least 46 close calls

that had occurred involving commercial passenger planes

in the US.

Wait, I just wanna pause on that.

That means more than once a day,

46 times in a single month.

That's right, on average,

it seemed like they were happening more than once a day.

And then when we looked at the NASA database

for the most recent 12 month period

for which data is available,

what we saw was roughly 300 documented reports

of close calls on the ground and in the air.

I mean, that's astonishing.

That suggests that there is a kind of crisis level frequency

of planes nearly colliding.

That's right, it was shocking.

It also confirmed what a lot of people

involved in the industry were telling us

that this is happening just way, way more

than the public realizes.

City, I want us to define this term we're using

because it's going to be very important

for the rest of our conversation.

When we say close call, what exactly do we mean?

So a classic example is something that occurs on a runway

where you can actually see it,

where two planes get too close together,

a pilot has to slam on the brakes.

That's a classic example of a close call.

But in the air, there are also rules

about how close these planes can get to each other.

And in general, planes are not supposed to get

within three miles horizontally

and a thousand feet vertically of each other.

And this doesn't necessarily sound really close,

especially if you're used to driving a car

where these sound like pretty big distances.

But remember that planes are going hundreds of miles

an hour in the air, sometimes over 500 miles an hour.

And these gaps can close within seconds.

So Cindy, give us some examples of the really close calls

that you have been finding in these databases

and in these FAA reports

that most of us didn't even know have happened.

Sure, so in July, for example,

there was an incident that occurred in New Orleans

at the New Orleans airport

where a Delta Airlines flight is preparing to take off

on a runway and at the same time,

a Southwest plane is cleared to land

on the exact same runway.

The Southwest pilot realizes that it's getting too close

and at the last second pulls up and aborts the landing

and avoids a potential collision by just seconds.

Wow, I mean, that would have been absolutely awful.

An accelerating plane on the same runway

as a very fast approaching landing plane

would have potentially been catastrophic.

Exactly.

And then a little over a week later in San Francisco,

an American Airlines plane is accelerating down the runway

for takeoff at more than 160 miles per hour

and narrowly misses a frontier Airlines plane

whose nose had jutted into its path on the same runway.

And then moments later,

a German airliner is also accelerating for takeoff

and just misses the frontier Airlines plane.

And so the American Airlines plane

and the German airliner got so close

to the frontier Airlines plane

that in internal documents,

the FAA describes these encounters as quote,

skin to skin.

Which is a very evocative phrase.

It sounds like FAA way of saying way too close.

Way, way, way too close.

And then two and a half weeks later in the sky,

an American flight to Dallas

was traveling at more than 500 miles per hour

when a collision alert blares in the cockpit

because a United flight had been given incorrect instructions

and was on a collision course with the American flight.

At the last second,

the American pilot had to yank the plane up

and it climbed 700 feet to avoid a potential collision.

Sydney, these are clearly close calls,

terrifyingly close calls,

but none of them produced actual collisions.

And if you fly in America,

you are constantly reminded that our passenger airline system

is the safest in the world and planes don't crash.

They don't fall out of the sky.

And so how worried should we really be

about these close calls that you're describing?

So let's be clear, it is incredibly safe to fly.

The last fatal crash involving a major US airline

occurred 14 years ago in 2009.

But what people are telling us

is that that safety record sort of masks these risks

that we've uncovered, these near collisions are occurring

so frequently that we have people in the aviation industry

warning that we might be on borrowed time here,

that a collision is more likely

than you wanna believe it is.

And so, for example, in the NASA database,

there are some entries from pilots

and I'll read a couple of them if that's okay.

So in one, a longtime airline captain

who'd been involved in a close call,

wrote, honestly, this stuff scares the crap out of me.

And another pilot after being involved in a close call

on a runway in January wrote,

this has really opened my eyes

to how the next aviation accident may play out.

And these kind of warnings are coming

even from federal officials.

So in March, the chairwoman

of the National Transportation Safety Board,

she said, quote, the absence of a fatality or an accident

doesn't mean the presence of safety.

And she went on to say that these close calls

must serve as a wake-up call for every single one of us

before something more catastrophic occurs

before lives are lost.

So Sidney, the inevitable question is,

why is this happening?

Why are there so many close calls occurring

on the ground and in the sky?

That's exactly the question we were asking people

in the aviation industry.

And what they told us was this is emblematic

of a safety system that is under incredible strain.

And this safety system has been under strain for a long time,

but as air traffic starts returning to pre-pandemic levels

as everyone wants to fly,

this is reaching a breaking point.

The safety system is now so strained

that it's reached a full-blown crisis.

We'll be right back.

Sidney, tell us about this safety system

that is clearly under some real strain.

So the safety system that keeps planes and passengers safe

is really interesting.

It's built on layers,

and you can think of these layers

as there's the air traffic control layer,

the people who are guiding the planes

through the skies and into and out of airports.

There are the pilots who are steering these planes

and looking out at the skies around them.

And then you also have technology,

technology on runways and technology on the planes themselves

that alert controllers and pilots to potential collisions.

And in aviation circles,

this safety system is known as the Swiss cheese model.

So think about getting half a pound of Swiss cheese

for your sandwiches at the grocery store,

and you have all these different slices.

If something slips through the hole on one slice,

the odds are that the next slice underneath it,

the holes are not gonna align

and the cheese is gonna stop the thing from slipping

through the rest of the stack of Swiss cheese.

And there are all these redundancies built into the system.

So if one layer fails, the other layers are gonna catch it.

So based on your reporting,

which of these layers is faltering

and leading to these close calls?

So what we found in our reporting

was a lot of these close calls are caused by mistakes

among air traffic controllers and also among pilots.

And what we found was actually the most acute challenge

is the shortage of air traffic controllers across the country.

Okay, so explain that.

Why is there a shortage of air traffic controllers?

And how is that leading to this problem of close calls?

So the shortage in air traffic controllers

has been going on for years,

and it actually dates back to the early 1980s.

Air traffic controllers went on strike illegally.

They're federal employees.

They were not supposed to strike,

and President Reagan fired them.

He fired thousands of them.

And to replenish the ranks,

the government then had to hire new air traffic controllers.

And what this did was it sort of knocked off kilter

the natural cycle of hiring people

and having those people eventually retire at different times.

Instead, what you had was all of these controllers

were hired at once,

and then it created mass waves of retirement.

It gets a little complicated,

but air traffic controllers have to retire by the age of 56,

and they start becoming eligible to retire

after 20 years of service.

And what happened was the FAA

really just couldn't keep up with these mass retirements.

It started falling behind, and then the pandemic hit.

And the pandemic made things just a lot worse.

Why?

So of course you had air traffic controllers

who quit or retired early,

as happened around the country

in lots and lots of different industries,

but it also slowed training.

Training for air traffic controllers takes a while.

It's very intense.

But because of health restrictions,

you couldn't train as many air traffic controllers

as the FAA had to train.

And so you just start falling more and more and more behind.

And at this point, there are something like 10%

fewer fully certified air traffic controllers

than there were a decade ago.

In fact, we analyzed some numbers,

and there are only three air traffic facilities in the country

that are considered fully staffed as of May.

Wow.

Yeah, out of 313.

Sydney, the FAA presumably has had years

to recognize this shortage as a natural extension

of what Ronald Reagan did,

and to find ways to recruit to balance it out.

So why hasn't that happened?

Well, so the truth is that being a controller

is a really, really demanding, difficult job.

It's highly stressful.

They are spending long, long hours staring at planes.

Think about trying to keep planes apart

that you know have passengers on them.

And many controllers work a grueling schedule

called the Rattler, which is essentially rotating shifts

that start earlier and earlier in the day

until you get to the last day of your schedule

where you work two shifts in a 24-hour period.

Wow.

This really messes with their sleep schedules.

And if you don't have enough air traffic controllers,

what ends up happening is many have to work

mandatory six-day work weeks.

They have to work an extra day.

And this is what they say is leading

to a lot of these close calls.

They're just so, so exhausted mentally, physically,

that they can't focus and that the focus required

to be an air traffic controller,

they're just unable to keep for that long.

So what about the pilots?

Why are they as a layer of safety

in the system under strain right now

when it comes to close calls?

So during the pandemic,

you might remember that air traffic tanked.

No one wanted to fly on planes

and airlines started furloughing their pilots

and encouraging their older pilots to retire.

And what happened was these older experienced pilots,

a lot of them did retire and to replenish those ranks,

the major carriers started drying on regional airline pilots

and the experience level in the cockpits decreased.

So if you think about a 16-year-old driver

versus a 45-year-old driver,

the 16-year-old driver is gonna be

more prone to making mistakes.

This is what people in the industry tell us

that on average, the experience level of pilots

is a little lower, they're a little less seasoned.

So they're just more prone to making mistakes.

But according to the Swiss cheese safety model,

if I'm understanding what you told me correctly, Sydney,

an inexperienced pilot shouldn't be a huge problem

if they make an error because the next layer

is supposed to catch them, the air traffic controller.

And even if that air traffic controller

is overstretched or tired,

they should have their error caught by a pilot,

even if they are a little bit less experienced

than in the past, right?

I mean, that's the thinking.

That's right, but what you can see

is if you have less seasoned pilots in the cockpit

and you have overworked, exhausted controllers,

those holes in each layer of the Swiss cheese

are getting bigger and they're more likely to align.

The mistake is gonna slip through both layers.

Take a recent incident in Phoenix

that occurred in early August.

A controller gave an instruction to a pilot

on an American Airlines plane

about the departure route he was supposed to take

after he took off from the runway.

And the pilot repeated the instructions back incorrectly.

The air traffic controller didn't hear

the incorrect read back.

And so the American plane takes off

and instead of turning right, it turns left.

At the same time, a Southwest plane had taken off.

And so this American plane is now turning

into the path of the Southwest plane.

We can 1388 Phoenix departure,

verify four P1 departure.

We actually have the audio

of when another controller realizes what's happening.

1388, traffic alert, nine o'clock,

less than a mile, pulling 737, 3000.

Do you have a traffic in sight?

Yeah, we have a mark at 1388.

It can sound kind of confusing.

The controller is repeating things to the pilot.

The pilots are repeating it back.

I'm sitting right there.

Do you see the traffic?

1388.

But what you really note is the urgency

in the controller's voice.

1286, okay, if you turn left immediately, do so.

He tells the Southwest plane, turn if you need to.

Okay, did you make the turn?

We checked about 30 to the left.

And eventually...

Turn, I'll make sure American turns out of your way here.

So 226...

The planes do start diverging.

They do turn away from each other.

And the original sin in this situation

is kind of a worst case scenario

for this multi-layered system

because you have an error by a pilot

not being caught by that first controller,

a kind of double failure.

Exactly.

And what happened was these planes got so close together,

they got a third of a mile horizontally

and 300 feet vertically to each other,

which with planes going hundreds of miles per hour

is so, so dangerously close.

Okay.

So then Sidney, we get to the next layer

of this safety system, what you call the technology

that is supposed to keep these planes apart.

What's the story there

and why is it potentially contributing to the close calls?

So most importantly, there is technology

that alerts air traffic controllers to potential collisions.

This is surface detection technology,

but the problem there is that it's only

at 43 airports in the country

out of roughly 500 that serve commercial airlines.

Why so few?

So it's very expensive to install millions of dollars

and it's also old.

And the FAA says they're looking for newer technology,

but the result of not having this technology

at so many airports is close calls around runways.

And you can see this for instance in Austin

in the example that I mentioned earlier

involving the FedEx and Southwest planes

that got really close to each other.

Austin doesn't have this service technology.

And that people say is one of the reasons these planes

did get so close to each other

before the FedEx pilot pulled up and avoided a collision.

And then there's another piece of technology

that is really, really important on commercial airlines.

This technology is basically a collision avoidance technology

if two planes are getting too close to each other

or are looking like they're going to get

too close to each other.

This technology blares in the cockpit

and either alerts the pilot to potential traffic

or tells the pilot to climb or descend

if the planes are getting too close to each other.

So Sydney, what is and what can be done

to address all these strains?

Because everything you've told us suggests

that the FAA knows about all these close calls.

So why haven't they done more to try to prevent them?

Well, it really comes down to money.

They would love to be able to hire more controllers

but it costs money.

They want to be able to install more technology on runways

but that also costs money

and they submit budget requests to Congress every year.

But in the end, it's the money that they get.

This is what they would tell us.

But even with these measures

that they are saying they want to take,

people tell us that this is just not enough.

The shortage in air traffic controllers is so severe

that the number of air traffic controllers

that the FAA wants to hire with the money that they have

is not going to solve the problem.

The technology on runways is old

and they need to find new technology.

They say that they are working on that

but that could be yours from being installed.

So there's a lot of frustration right now

among pilots and among air traffic controllers

that they want attention on this.

They want the public to know that close calls are happening

and they want the FAA to do more.

Which makes sense.

And Sydney, what's so interesting and important

about the investigation that you and Emily Steele did

is that it's coming before a deadly tragedy.

So often in journalism we do this kind of reporting

after something terrible happens.

And here you're finding that people are trying

to ring the alarms and are ringing the alarms before

and in anticipation of a tragedy.

Which means that there is really an opportunity

to prevent something awful from happening.

Yeah, there is an opportunity here.

But what a lot of people we talked to said was

they are worried that nothing is going to happen

or that the FAA is not going to do enough.

There's this sort of very, very cynical take

which is that the FAA in some circles

is known as the Tombstone Agency.

That is, they won't do anything

until something catastrophic does occur,

until people do die.

The people we talk to say there really is no excuse

for the FAA not to do something

before one of these close calls leads to a fatal crash.

Sydney, thank you very much, we appreciate it.

Thank you, Michael.

We'll be right back.

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