A commercial plane and a business jet have narrowly avoided a collision on a Chicago airport runway in the latest air incident at a US airport.
The Federal Aviation Administration said the Southwest airlines flight was forced to abort a landing at Chicago Midway when a business jet entered the runway without authorisation.
Footage from a live stream of the airport shows at about 8:50am local time, Southwest Flight 2504, a Boeing 737-800 arriving from Omaha, Nebraska, abruptly pulled up and flew over a FlexJet Challenger on the runway.
The Southwest plane performed a go-around, a manoeuvrer in which it circled and reapproached the landing.
The FAA and National Transportation Safety Board are investigating the incident.
Southwest said the crew "followed safety procedures and the flight landed without incident".
According to Southwest's website, its Boeing 737-800 aircraft can carry 175 passengers.
The business jet, which Flexjet says can carry up to nine passengers, had been taxiing on runway 31C before departing for Knoxville, Tennessee.
The Southwest jet had descended to an altitude of about 50 feet when it abandoned its landing only about 625 metres away from the business jet, according to tracking service Flightradar 24.
As it abruptly rose, the Southwest plane had only reached an altitude of 250 feet when it passed over the smaller aircraft, the service said.
'How'd that happen?'
Audio recording of communication between the smaller jet and the control tower recorded its pilot misstating instructions from a ground tower employee, who repeated that the pilot should "hold short" of a runway.
About 30 seconds later, the ground tower ordered the pilot "hold your position there."
The tower employee is then heard saying: "FlexJet560, your instructions were to hold short of runway 31 center."
Separately, a recording of communication between the Southwest crew and another ground tower employee captured its pilot reporting "Southwest 2504 going around" and following directions to climb back to 3,000 feet.
Seconds later, the audio captures the pilot asking the tower: "Southwest 2504, how'd that happen?"
Flexjet, the plane's owner, said the company is aware "of the occurrence in Chicago."
"Flexjet adheres to the highest safety standards and we are conducting a thorough investigation," a spokesperson said in a statement.
"Any action to rectify and ensure the highest safety standards will be taken."
Air traffic control audio made clear that the business jet failed to heed clear instruction not to cross the runway, said former NSTB member and FAA investigator Jeff Guzzetti.
Mr Guzzetti called it a "very serious runway incursion", adding "the sky is not falling because last year was the lowest recorded number of serious runway incursions in a decade."
There were 22 of these serious events in 2023, but just seven in 2024, he said, citing FAA data.
The FAA website shows that there were six category A runway incursions in 2024 and two last year.
The FAA defines a Category A runway incursion as "a serious incident in which a collision was narrowly avoided."
The website also said In the first three months of 2024, the rate of serious incidents (category A and B) decreased by 59 per cent from the same period in 2023
There can be several factors that contribute to these incidents, Mr Guzzetti said: "Was the crew distracted? Was the controller overworked?"
John Goglia, a former NTSB member, said the near-crash showed "the system worked exactly as it was designed to."
That is because the Southwest pilot was aware that the other plane wasn't going to stop in time, he said.
In probing the incident, investigators will likely look at factors including how well-staffed the tower was and whether instructions coming out of the tower were clear, he said.
"Those things do happen," he said, citing possible miscommunication, including a pilot mishearing instructions.
A series of air disasters
It comes after a series of air disasters in the US and Canada on commercial and light planes.
In January, 67 people died when an American Airlines plane with 64 people on board was approaching the runway at the airport when it collided with a Sikorsky H-60 helicopter carrying three people.
A week later, ten people were killed in a Bering Air plane crash in Alaska.
On February 17, A Delta Air Lines flight carrying 80 people crashed while landing at Pearson airport in Toronto.
Remarkably, despite the plane flipping upside down, all survived.
Last week, a midair collision of two small planes in Arizona killed two people.
These incidents are still being investigated.
Over the last two years, a series of troubling near-miss incidents has raised concerns about US aviation safety and the strain on understaffed air traffic control operations.
There was no indication of air traffic control error in Tuesday's incident.
In October, the FAA said it was opening an audit into runway incursion risks at the 45 busiest US airports.
Democrats in Congress seized on the fact that the Trump administration recently fired 352 FAA workers, including some involved in safety operations.
"Maybe not the best time to fire hundreds of FAA workers, tell the remaining workers you want to 'put them in trauma'," Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut said on Tuesday, citing a comment from a Trump administration official.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has said firings did not include any "safety-critical positions" or air traffic controllers.
The FAA, which has aging technology and facilities and needs billions of dollars to modernise, is about 3,500 air traffic controllers short of targeted staffing, prompting the aviation industry and lawmakers to call for action.
ABC/Reuters
