Two weeks ago, an aircraft collision at Washington, D.C.’s Reagan National Airport claimed the lives of 67 people. As tragic as it was, incidents like this are always big news, because they’re extremely rare.
There was a runway collision at Scottsdale airport earlier this week that killed one person. But the Reagan Airport crash was the deadliest plane crash in nearly 20 years. But the number of near-miss crashes is far less known.
With renewed scrutiny on the behavior of both the pilots and the air traffic control officials involved in the Reagan crash, Taylor Seely, a reporter at the Arizona Republic, investigated how close we’ve come to similar situations here in Phoenix at Sky Harbor International Airport and joined The Show to discuss.
Full conversation
SAM DINGMAN: Good morning, Taylor.
TAYLOR SEELY: Good morning.
DINGMAN: So, you tried to tally up the number of close calls at Sky Harbor over the past decade. What did you find?
SEELY: Well, what I found was, first, it was a little difficult to find, but there were a couple databases that gave us some insight and through a voluntary non-punitive reporting program for pilots, we found that there were six near midair collisions and then that combined with another database from the FAA showed there were three more, so nine total in the last decade, two of which occurred in the last 12 months.
DINGMAN: Now, when we're talking about these near miss collisions, what exactly are we talking about? How, how close are these planes coming to each other?
SEELY: It's a good question. How the FAA describes a near miss is, and sometimes you'll hear it referred to as a loss of separation, but it basically refers to an aircraft coming into contact with another one within 500 ft. So if they come within 500 ft of each other, that's considered loss of separation and can also be considered a near miss or a close call.
DINGMAN: So you mentioned that these reports and this information was a little bit difficult to find and collect. One of the interesting nuggets for me in your piece was that in order for the FAA to trigger a formal investigation of such an incident, there's something very specific that a pilot has to say. Can you tell us what that is?
SEELY: Yeah, they have to explicitly state, I wish to report a near midair collision. If they don't say those explicit words, the air traffic controller won't necessarily consider it a formal call to action, so that procedure internally at the FAA won't necessarily be triggered.
DINGMAN: And so would it be fair to say that this voluntary reporting infrastructure that you were alluding to that is, as you also mentioned, non-punitive, that has kind of sprung up as a way to try to catch incidents where the pilot doesn't say the magic words?
SEELY: Correct. And then in fact, you know, this non-punitive reporting program that I found through NASA, it's one of many actually. There are other reporting programs that are voluntary and non-punitive also for airline carriers.
So there's a variety of ways that these reports can come into existence, and then those are provided, or, you know, at least when necessary, provided to the FAA or the National Transportation Safety Board, so that the necessary folks are having conversations about, hey, what happened here? How can we improve it? What kind of guidance do we need to issue to the industry as a whole to make sure that those incidents don't happen again. But absolutely, the nine cases that I found in the last decade is undoubtedly an undercount.
DINGMAN: And so what is the status of those nine cases? Were there formal investigations of those?
SEELY: Of those nine cases, three were formally investigated by the FAA. The other six again were done through that non-punitive program where pilots reported to NASA, then the FAA uses that information. I could not tell you if from an exact specific incident in Sky Harbor it triggered guidance from the FAA or NTSB to the industry, but what the FAA did tell me was that they use this data to provide things like safety alerts for operators, or sometimes these things can even result in what's called airworthiness directives.
That's a little bit of a stronger form of guidance for the industry to say, hey, these things can happen. Here's what you need to do to make sure it doesn't happen again.
DINGMAN: So, obviously we're just talking about the Sky Harbor numbers here. Sky Harbor, obviously a very large airport in a very large city. How do our numbers compare to other big cities?
SEELY: Well, what I looked at was kind of comparing how busy our airport is to the next busiest. So FAA lists Sky Harbor as the 14th busiest commercial airport in the country. The next one is the George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston. Looking just at the FAA database where Phoenix had thee in the last decade, Houston's airport had 15. So I think it's probably safe to say that we do not rank among, you know, the highest. I think that, Houston alone has more than Phoenix in the last decade just from the FAA database, not including the NASA database.
DINGMAN: Yes, and in that vein, lest people think we're fear mongering here, as you point out in the piece, air travel remains very safe overall, but you do also point out that there are some longstanding concerns about air traffic control staffing, and that those date back to well before the Trump or even the Biden administrations, right?
SEELY: Right. Yeah, I mean, there have been, you know, government watchdog offices that have been calling for, calling out concerns about air traffic control staffing, necessary updates to the systems that those air traffic controllers used. The air traffic controller union president has said multiple times now that there are about 10,000 air traffic controllers compared to the roughly 14,000 that we needed.
I think the good news in Phoenix is that we have two towers, we have an approach tower, and then we have a tower that directs the planes once they're actually literally departing or landing at our airport. Our regional center is 91% staffed. Our tower is 75% staffed. That is among the better staffed towers in the country.
