Disaster Waiting To Happen? Plane That Scraped Truck Wasn’t the 1st Close Call on Runway 29.

Landing on Runway 29 offers a dramatic approach into Newark Liberty International Airport.

On the left is the sprawling Manhattan skyline. As the plane descends, it makes a sharp right turn over the Vincent R. Casciano Memorial Bridge crossing Newark Bay to line up with the runway centerline, before skimming above the multiple lanes of the New Jersey Turnpike and touching down onto the airport’s shortest runway.

There’s little margin for error amid one of the world’s busiest airspaces.

And last week, a United 767-400 inbound from Italy came in far too low, striking the top of a bakery truck on the Turnpike before safely landing with 221 passengers and 10 crew members.

The truck driver was the only person involved who suffered any injuries, and they were minor. But had the plane come any lower, it could have had fatal consequences.

The National Transportation Safety Board has just begun its investigation of the May 3 landing. United declined further comment because of the open NTSB investigation.

But an examination of safety incidents involving Runway 29 at Newark found at least nine reports over the past 10 years by pilots who found themselves unexpectedly below minimum altitude limits on final approach into a difficult runway that forced them to either quickly abort landings or take immediate corrective action.

In one of those reports, a pilot this past December was forced to execute a go-around — circling around for a new approach to land on 29 — after receiving a low altitude alert by air traffic control.

“We had received numerous vectors, speed, and altitude changes from ATC which made autopilot management a bit challenging,” wrote the pilot in the report filed with NASA’s Aviation Safety Reporting System, or ASRS, a voluntary and confidential safety reporting system that collects information about unsafe occurrences, near-misses or close calls, hazardous situations from pilots, air traffic controllers, dispatchers and others.

The pilot, who was unidentified, noted they were closing in on another aircraft about 4 miles ahead before being advised to slow down. They then received the warning from controllers.

“I looked at my altitude and saw we were 700 feet below our next target altitude of 1,900,” the first officer reported. “So I immediately clicked off the autopilot and executed a go-around.”

In June of 2024, another crew lined up for Runway 29 also received a low altitude alert.

“Both the captain and I have never done the approach before. In the gusty conditions, we momentarily dipped below published altitude,” the first officer wrote in the ASRS report. The flight crew leveled off and then continued approach, according to their narrative.

More recently, authorities in March said an Alaska Airlines jet and a FedEx cargo plane attempting to land on crossing runways led to what they labeled “a close call” at Newark involving both Runway 29 and the airport’s longer main runway which one aircraft overflew the other. Authorities are still investigating that incident as well.

Heavy traffic

The skies above Newark Liberty and nearby LaGuardia and Kennedy International airports — further sandwiched by Teterboro to the north and Morristown airport to the west — is the most complex and congested airspace in the world, according to one former controller who worked the radars there.

“Three Bravo airspaces squished together. It’s pretty chaotic,” he said, referring to the designated corridors in and out of the highly regulated skies around the airports, known as Class B or Bravo airspace, which surrounds the busiest airports in the country.

Runway 29 actually carries the designation of Runway 11/29, depending on which direction aircraft are flying in or out of. Runway numbers indicate rough compass headings (110 degrees vs 290 degrees). At 6,725 feet, it is the shortest of Newark’s three runways and the most challenging to fly.

Michael McCormick, a certified flight controller who is now a professor of Air Traffic Management at Embry‑Riddle Aeronautical University in Florida, said just to the east is the LaGuardia airspace, so any aircraft attempting to land on Newark’s Runway 29 has to navigate on the centerline of the approach to effectively stay in its lane of traffic.

And since FAA’s New York Terminal Radar Approach Control center, or TRACON, was moved to Philadelphia, he said it has become even more challenging because controllers must get on the phone to tell LaGuardia if there’s been an incursion.

Further complicating matters, said McCormick, is that the approach from the east to the runway is sharply curved as an aircraft follows navigational waypoints from the north at minimum crossing altitudes.

“It’s not a straight-in approach,” he explained.

While Runway 11/29 can also be utilized for both arrivals and departures, it is mostly used for arrivals in an approach from the east with increased wind speeds coming out of the west, or departures in the same direction into the wind. Arrivals from the west don’t work well because they interrupt the final approach on Teterboro and Morristown.

At the same time, because of the operational constraints and wind direction during certain times of the year, the short runway does not see a lot of traffic most days. Weather, though, likely played a role in assigning United 169 to land there last week.

McCormick said there were significant wind gusts over 30 knots from the west. Planes get more lift when flying into the wind, so the runway made sense that afternoon. The 767, while a large aircraft, would have been relatively light after burning most of its fuel on the international flight, making it suitable for the shorter runway.

At the same time, the radar track of the aircraft as captured by FlightAware showed that it came down from the north on the New Jersey side of the river. That meant that they were executing a visual approach rather than an instrument approach to Newark, McCormick noted.

“That means the aircraft has even less room to fly straight in to descend, which could contribute to a lower-than-optimal altitude on the last segment of the approach,” he pointed out.

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And while the NTSB investigation is ongoing, there is no doubt that United 169 was at a lower-than-optimal altitude as it prepared to touch down just before 2 p.m. on May 3.

Donald Boardly Jr. was driving an 18-wheeler south on the New Jersey Turnpike when the jet’s main landing gear collided with a pole and his tractor-trailer near Exit 14.

Boardly’s father later told reporters that his son recalled seeing a flash and ducking as he was struck in the head “with a real force.” Authorities said he was hospitalized with minor injuries.

Transmissions with air traffic control did not indicate that there was any low altitude warning before the plane overflew the Turnpike. Investigators will examine whether cockpit instruments issued any warnings to the crew.

Ground radar looks at the altitude and descent rate of an aircraft that can create a “low altitude” audible alert to controllers, who can warn air crews to check their altitude. “There are also ground proximity alerts on the aircraft,” McCormick said. “That will be one of the first things the NTSB looks into.”

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Another factor the safety board will evaluate is possible crew fatigue.

“It was a long international flight,” he said, making note of the July 2013 crash of an Asiana Airlines Boeing 777 on approach to San Francisco International Airport, after striking a seawall.

Three of the 291 passengers on board were killed and the aircraft was destroyed.

In that case, the NTSB found the flight crew’s mismanagement of the airplane’s altitude during the initial approach led to a period of increased workload that led to the unintended deactivation of automatic airspeed control. But the flight crew did not initiate a go-around until the airplane was below 100 feet in altitude, at which point the airplane did not have the performance capability to accomplish a go-around, investigators found.

“The flight crew was experiencing fatigue, which likely degraded their performance during the approach,” the NTSB found.

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