Near-Midair Collisions Occur Every Few Days

By DON WALKER

FLORIDA TODAY

MELBOURNE, Fla. -- Near-midair collisions are relatively rare events, but they do happen every few days at airports large and small across the United States.

Ninety near-midair collisions were reported to the Federal Aviation Administration in 2010, the last year for which complete national statistics are available. Since they're reported voluntarily the statistics probably do not include every case.

Among the recent near-miss incidents at airports in Melbourne, Fla., and elsewhere that have been reported in public records and news accounts:

In 2010, a commercial aircraft was cleared to land at Melbourne International Airport when it detected a helicopter about 500 feet away at the same altitude on a course to collide with the airplane. The airplane veered to avoid the collision.

Last April, a 737 carrying First Lady Michelle Obama had to abort an attempted landing at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland in order to avoid coming too close to a military cargo jet taking off from that runway. A civilian air traffic controller in Virginia had allowed the planes to come within 3 miles of each other instead of the 5 miles separation required.

In March 2010, a commercial passenger jet came within 100 feet of a single-engine Cessna while approaching Boston's Logan International Airport. Responding to an alert from the airplane's collision avoidance system, the pilot began climbing to avoid the smaller plane.

A glance at an air traffic controller's radar screen might make a non-trained, regular air traveler think it was a chaotic nightmare. But that's not the case, aviation experts say.

"There's nothing chaotic about that," said Kathleen Bergen, a spokeswoman for the FAA in Atlanta. "It's all very well organized and orchestrated." "Every one of those flights is flying on a flight plan and is in communication with air traffic control. Controllers are tracking every flight on radar."

But not every flight is operating under air traffic control. "Many general aviation flights safely operate outside the air traffic control system," Bergen said.

Communication between pilots and air traffic controllers is being investigated in the plane crash Wednesday that killed a pilot and two passengers at Melbourne International.

Recordings of the radio communication between the plane and control tower indicate the crash may have happened after two planes attempted to use the same runway -- with the pilot of the doomed Cirrus aircraft making a last-second maneuver to avoid collision.

Lead National Transportation Safety Board investigator Brian Rayner said communications between the air-traffic control tower and the plane's pilot will be analyzed. "There were several airplanes in the traffic pattern at the time of the accident, operating off parallel runways," he said. "We will be looking at the separation and conflict resolution of those aircraft, if they were sequenced properly."

Said Bergen with the FAA, "Clear, concise communications between pilots and controllers is vital. "The FAA conducts regular pilot safety meetings at airports around Florida and across the country. FAA air-traffic controllers and managers attend the meetings to brief pilots on the importance of clear, concise communications."

Terry von Thaden, an air-safety researcher at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, said some airports are busier than others, but the public can't make a blanket swipe at airline safety based on databases that document pilot/air-traffic controller conflicts. "People tend to report on things that are negative, things that bother them. They're not going to report a really great flying experience," she said. "But information on these events or incidents can help prevent an accident in the future."

The system works, Thaden said.

"It's safe to fly. This is one of those unfortunate events that happen," she said of the Melbourne crash. "The public always wonders how airplanes fly, so there's a curiosity about airplanes that we tend to think about them more when there's a crash -- even when there's thousands of car crashes every day that don't get quite that attention."

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(Contributing: John McCarthy, Florida Today Enterprise editor.)

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