The control tower had cleared the wide-body passenger jet for final approach, and the flight crew prepared for a routine landing at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. The aircraft descended gently toward Earth: 1,000 feet, 500 feet, 100 feet. Then the pilots saw the other plane.
“The jet looked very large and was exactly in the center of the runway,” a flight crew member later wrote.
The landing plane’s first officer quickly pulled back on the controls to abort the landing, accelerating and climbing simultaneously. The plane circled the airport once more before approaching again. This time, it landed uneventfully.
The flight crew, however, was shaken.
“What if we floated, landed long, had brake issues?” a crew member wrote. “What do the passengers think on the right side of the aircraft as they see another large aircraft barreling towards them? … None of us has ever seen another aircraft cross an active runway while a landing aircraft is in the flare or rolling down the runway.”
If this was part of a new traffic pattern at O’Hare, the crew member wrote, “I think it is trouble waiting to happen.”
1,500 ‘critical’ incidents in 2024
According to a Straight Arrow News analysis of federal data, this was one of more than 1,500 serious incidents involving U.S. passenger planes in 2024. The analysis shows that recent episodes involving communications outages and near-misses on airport runways are surprisingly common, raising questions about the overall safety of the U.S. air travel system.
The data comes from the Aviation Safety Reporting System, maintained by NASA. Calling itself “the world’s largest repository of voluntary, confidential safety information,” the system accepts reports from pilots, air traffic controllers, flight attendants, ground crews, mechanics and others.
SAN analyzed only incidents that NASA reviewers deemed “critical” and only those in which at least one of the planes involved was a commercial aircraft, more than four a day, on average. Almost 4,000 additional incidents involving private aircraft also appear in the database.
The reports cover a wide range of issues, such as mid-flight mechanical problems, planes nearly bumping into each other as they jockey for position near crowded airport gates, and near-collisions like the one in Chicago.
Many details are redacted from the publicly available version of the database: the names of airlines and aircraft manufacturers, the number of passengers on board and, in many cases, the airports where incidents occurred.
However, a narrative account details each incident, often showing that quick action by pilots and air traffic controllers — not to mention good luck — prevented situations that could have resulted in mass casualties.
Avoiding accidents with seconds to spare
In January 2024, a passenger jet was preparing to take off from Honolulu International Airport when the pilot stopped short of a runway he had been cleared to cross. A moment later, according to a crew member, another plane passed by as it was about to touch down on the same runway.
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A Straight Arrow News analysis found that 1,520 “critical” air safety incidents happened in 2024, more than four a day.
The airport’s control tower apparently didn’t realize what had almost happened.
“The controller sounded very busy as they were working multiple types of traffic to multiple runways,” the crew member wrote.
This was one of numerous reports of miscommunication between control towers and flight crews.
At Miami International in February 2024, a pilot had to quickly divert onto a taxiway when he realized another plane was taking off from the runway where he had just landed. However, a crew member wrote, “After the captain made the evasive maneuver, the ground controller admonished the crew for taking the wrong taxiway.”
Many potential accidents were avoided with just seconds to spare.
One pilot reported that he was just 200 feet from landing at Austin-Bergstrom International in Texas when he saw another plane on his runway. The pilot executed what is known as a “go-around,” steering the plane back into the air to circle the airport until the runway was clear.
In September 2024, a passenger jet was less than 2 miles from landing on a runway at Boston Logan International when the control tower told another jet to take off from the same runway. Moments later, the flight crew saw yet another plane, a smaller regional jet, crossing the same runway.
Just as the passenger jet’s pilot was opting for an emergency maneuver, the control tower told him to pull up and circle the airport before landing.
“We were shocked as this was extremely close,” a crew member wrote after the close call. “Seems like both the jet and crossing traffic were way too close, and the tower should have waited.”
Safety concerns
Statistically, air travel is safer than any other form of transportation, even if that hasn’t seemed to be the case recently.
“Flying is incredibly safe,” Guy Gratton, an associate professor of aviation and the environment at Cranfield University in England, recently told CNN. “And all the processes put in place over a lot of years to make it as safe as possible are still there.”
U.S. airlines went 16 years without a major accident, from 2009 to January of this year, when an American Airlines plane approaching Reagan National Airport in Washington collided with an Army Black Hawk helicopter. Sixty-seven people — everyone aboard both aircraft — died.
Two days later, seven people died when an air ambulance crashed into a Philadelphia neighborhood, and a week after that, 10 people died when a commuter plane crashed near Nome, Alaska.
So far this year in the United States, 151 people have died in 44 air crashes, according to the National Transportation Safety Board. Most of the crashes involved small, privately owned planes, and in most cases, no more than two or three people were killed.
However, several near-misses have been reported, and on April 28, radar feeds and radio communications failed at Newark Liberty International, one of three major airports in the busy airspace around New York City. In early May, at least two additional communications outages took place at a regional control center that monitors the Newark airport.
On May 12, air traffic controllers lost contact with as many as 20 planes approaching Denver International. On Sunday, May 18, a power outage at Houston’s Hobby Airport forced inbound planes to circle the airport for several minutes.
According to CNN, 40 U.S. airports have experienced radio or radar failures since 2022.
contributed to this report.
