Two planes almost collided at New York airport: employees were so busy that they overlooked

Overcrowding and multitasking of pilots and air traffic controllers at JFK have put several hundred passengers on American Airlines and Delta planes at risk. These are the conclusions reached by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) after an investigation into the incident on January 13, 2023, when two airliners nearly collided on the runway. The details were provided by the publication ABC.

Air traffic controllers cleared the Delta Air Lines plane for takeoff on runway 4L. However, 20 seconds after it began accelerating for takeoff, an American Airlines airliner bound for London entered the same runway, although it had not received permission to do so.

NTSB investigators said many factors contributed to the American Airlines captain's error, including "interference and multitasking on the flight deck."

“Two crew members did not notice the captain’s error because both were engaged in tasks that diverted their visual attention from the exterior of the aircraft,” the agency’s report said.

Investigators also found that the controller who was giving taxi instructions to the American Airlines plane "failed to notice that it had veered onto the wrong taxiway because he was performing a lower-priority task that required him to look down."

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A series of similar errors led to the fact that while the Delta plane was flying at a speed of 190 miles per hour, an American Airlines airliner entered the track in front of it. It's scary to imagine what could have happened if the computer had not intervened in the situation.

The ASDE-X airport monitoring system noticed a discrepancy on one of the runways and began sounding audible and visual alarms in the control tower.

Five seconds after the initial signals, the controller canceled the Delta plane's takeoff clearance, forcing its pilot to slow down and allow the American Airlines jet to pass safely in front of it.

The NTSB has been pushing for ASDE-X technology at airports since 1991. JFK adopted ASDE-X in 2009 and is one of 35 major airports equipped with it.

The NTSB issued several recommendations in response to this incident. One of them is to encourage airplane crews to say out loud the number of the runway they are about to cross.

In addition, the NTSB called on the Federal Aviation Administration to require all airliners to be equipped with cockpit voice recorders (colloquially known as “black boxes”) that record 25 hours of audio instead of two.