FAA Investigates Airliner Near-Miss: 'This Was Just Really Poor Judgment'

Photo: Jordan Vonderhaar/Bloomberg (Getty Images)

In aviation, there’s a theory called Big Sky — the idea that there’s just so much sky out there, it’s unlikely for two planes to ever hit each other. Before radar and GPS, it was an accepted way for pilots to avoid midair collisions. As it turns out, it’s a little less accepted when you’re running air traffic control.

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An Federal Aviation Administration and National Transportation Safety Board investigation into a near-miss at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport traced the situation back to a lone air traffic controller, one who appeared to be taking a “Big Runway” approach to plane routing. The controller, according to the Washington Post, cleared a Southwest 737 for takeoff and a FedEx cargo plane for landing on the same runway – and at overlapping times:

On the morning of Feb. 4, Austin-Bergstrom International Airport was blanketed in fog. Air traffic controller Damian Campbell couldn’t see the Southwest jet from the tower but cleared it to take off. Campbell told NTSB investigators that the airline’s pilots tended to move quickly, so he expected there was plenty of time before the cargo jet would need to be on the runway.

“They were rolling, I assume,” Campbell said. But when he realized he couldn’t hear the sound of the 737′s engines, Campbell said he knew something was wrong.

…

Campbell told investigators that looking back, he could have prevented the Southwest plane from departing. “Hindsight being 20/20 definitely could have held them,” Campbell said.

The complicating factor here appears to be the fog, which prevented Campbell from physically seeing the planes he was directing — an issue Campbell credits to the airport’s dated equipment, which doesn’t give the same kind of proximity warnings that modern tech does.

Perhaps this is something of a hot take, but I think planes should be able to take off and land in fog without hitting each other. Whether the fix is additional ATC training or fancy new software matters little to me — I just don’t want to live through Die Hard 2 at every press trip.