The Daily - Passenger Planes Nearly Collide Far More Than You Know

Episode Date: September 5, 2023

A Times investigation found that U.S. passenger planes come dangerously close to crashing into each other far more frequently than the public knows.Sydney Ember, an economics reporter for The Times, explains why an aviation system known for its safety is producing such a steady stream of close calls.Guest: Sydney Ember, an economics correspondent for The New York Times.Background reading: Airline close calls happen far more often than previously known.What you need to know about turbulence.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

From New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, a Times investigation has found that U.S. passenger planes come dangerously close to crashing into each other far more frequently than the public knows. to crashing into each other far more frequently than the public knows. My colleague, Sydney Ember, explains why an aviation system known for its safety is producing such a steady stream of close calls. It's Tuesday, September 5th. Sydney, tell us how this investigation started for you.

So you might remember back in the winter, travel for passengers became a total nightmare. Southwest had a meltdown, and then a couple weeks later, there was a system failure at the Federal Aviation Administration. And this led to lots of delays, lots of cancellations, and thousands of passengers were stranded. They were livid. Congress was mad. And our editor came to us and essentially said, go figure out why air travel is so annoying. Right. And seemingly so broken. And seemingly so broken. And so we started talking to people in the aviation industry. We started talking to people who worked at airlines, pilots. We started talking to air

traffic controllers, really anyone we could think of who might be able to explain this to us. And what they started saying was, actually, there's a more important story here to tell, and it's about safety. The safety system underlying aviation, underlying safety for planes and passengers is under tremendous stress. And at the same time, we started seeing a spate of public near-misses. And these were near collisions between two planes that were occurring generally around or at airports. A terrifying near-miss between two passenger planes on the runway at New York's JFK Airport. There was one incident in mid-January at JFK. Delta 1943, cancel takeoff plans.

An American Airlines plane made a wrong turn and crossed a runway as a Delta plane was taking off. You could feel a jolt as the brakes activated. Several weeks later. In Austin, an airport crisis caught just in time. A FedEx plane was cleared to land as a Southwest plane was cleared to take off. Just seconds away from disaster, the FedEx pilots initiated what is called a go-around.

There were other incidents in Sarasota, one in Boston. It was just the latest instance of a close call at an airport, leaving many wondering what's going on. It was just a whole slew of incidents that directed attention on whether aviation, you know, flying as we know it is safe. Right. So it sounds like just as people in the industry are telling you, hey, there's a safety problem, focus on that, that you can't not focus on it because these incidents are starting to happen. So what did you do next? Oh, man. We continue to talk to people and we started asking them, are these incidents that have been occurring across the country,

are there more of them than we know about? And also, what's causing them? And what they told us was there is no real authoritative, comprehensive source that shows how many commercial planes are coming into these near collisions. And so what I started doing with my colleague, Emily Steele, was digging around and trying to figure out if we could identify close calls that hadn't been publicly reported or that most of the public wouldn't know about. So we started combing through public databases, including one maintained by NASA, that have reports by pilots, air traffic controllers, really anyone involved in aviation about any safety issues, including close calls.

And eventually, we were also able to gain access to these safety reports that detail incidents across, a picture started to emerge of a lot more close calls than almost anyone realizes are happening, occurring extremely frequently, really alarmingly frequently. Well, what do you mean, just how frequently, just how alarmingly frequently did you find based on all this data that these close calls are happening? So using these safety reports and these other databases, what we found was this was happening multiple times on average every week. Wow. And we looked at July, for example, and we saw at least 46 close calls that had occurred involving commercial passenger planes in the U.S.

Wait, I just want to pause on that. That means more than once a day, 46 times in a single month. That's right. On average, it seemed like they were happening more than once a day. And then when we looked at the NASA database for the most recent 12-month period for which data is available, what we saw was roughly 300 documented reports of close calls on the ground and in the air. I mean, that's astonishing. That suggests that there is a kind of crisis level frequency of planes nearly colliding.

That's right. It was shocking. It also confirmed what a lot of people involved in the industry were telling us, that this is happening just way, way more than the public realizes. Sydney, I want us to define this term we're using because it's going to be very important for the rest of our conversation. When we say close call, what exactly do we mean? So a classic example is something that occurs on a runway where you can actually see it, where two planes get too close together, a pilot has to slam on the brakes. That's a classic example of a close call. But in the air, there are also rules about how close these planes can get to each other. And in general, planes are not supposed to get within three miles horizontally and a thousand feet vertically of each other. Hmm.

And this doesn't necessarily sound really close, especially if you're used to driving a car where these sound like pretty big distances. But remember that planes are going hundreds of miles an hour in the air, sometimes over 500 miles an hour, and these gaps can close within seconds. So, Cindy, give us some examples of the really close calls that you have been finding in these databases and in these FAA reports that most of us didn't even know have happened. Sure. So in July, for example, there was an incident that occurred in New Orleans at the New Orleans airport where a Delta Airlines flight is preparing to take off on a runway

and at the same time, a Southwest plane is cleared to land on the exact same runway. The Southwest pilot realizes that it's getting too close and at the last second pulls up and aborts the landing and avoids a potential collision by just seconds. Wow. I mean, that would have been absolutely awful. An accelerating plane on the same runway as a very fast approaching landing plane would have potentially been catastrophic. Exactly. And then a little over a week later in San Francisco, an American Airlines plane is accelerating down the runway for takeoff at more than 160 miles per hour and narrowly misses a Frontier Airlines plane whose nose had jutted into its path on the same runway. And then moments later, a German airliner is also accelerating for takeoff and just misses the Frontier Airlines plane. And so the American Airlines plane and the German airliner got so close to the Frontier Airlines plane that in internal documents, the FAA describes these encounters as, quote, skin to skin.

Which is a very evocative phrase. It sounds like a FAA way of saying way too close. per hour when a collision alert blares in the cockpit because a United flight had been given incorrect instructions and was on a collision course with the American flight. At the last second, the American pilot had to yank the plane up and it climbed 700 feet to avoid a potential Sydney, these are clearly close calls, terrifyingly close calls, but none of them produced actual collisions. And if you fly in America, you are constantly reminded that our passenger airline system is the safest in the world. And planes don't crash. they don't fall out of the sky. And so how worried should we really be about these close calls that you're describing? So let's be clear. It is incredibly safe to fly. The last fatal crash involving a major U.S. airline occurred 14 years ago in 2009. But what people are telling us is

that that safety record sort of masks these risks that we've uncovered. These near collisions are occurring so frequently that we have people in the aviation industry warning that we might be on borrowed time here, that a collision is more likely than you want to believe it is. And so, for example, in the NASA database, there are some entries from pilots, and I'll read a couple of them, if that's okay. So in one, a longtime airline captain who'd been involved in a close call wrote, honestly, this stuff scares the crap out of me. And another pilot, after being involved in a close call on a runway in January, wrote, this has really opened my eyes to how the next aviation accident may play out. And these kind of warnings are coming even from federal officials. So in March, the chairwoman of the National Transportation Safety Board, she said, quote, the absence of a fatality or an accident doesn't mean the presence of safety.

And she went on to say that these close calls must serve as a wake up call for every single one of us before something more catastrophic occurs, before lives are lost. So, Sydney, the inevitable question is, why is this happening? Why are there so many close calls occurring on the ground and in the sky? That's exactly the question we were asking people in the aviation industry. And what they told us was this is emblematic of a safety system that is under incredible

strain. And this safety system has been under strain for a long time. But as air traffic starts returning to pre-pandemic levels, as everyone wants to fly, this is reaching a breaking point. The safety system is now so strained that it's reached a full-blown crisis. We'll be right back.

We'll be right back. Sydney, tell us about this safety system that is clearly under some real strain. So the safety system that keeps planes and passengers safe is really interesting. It's built on layers. And you can think of these layers as there's the air traffic control layer, the people who are guiding the planes through the skies and into and out of airports. There are the pilots who are steering these planes and looking out at the skies around them. And then you also have technology, technology on runways and technology on the planes themselves that alert controllers and pilots to potential

collisions. And in aviation circles, the safety system is known as the Swiss cheese model. So think about getting, you know, half a pound of Swiss cheese for your sandwiches at the grocery store and you have all these different slices, if something slips through the hole on one slice, the odds are that the next slice underneath it, the holes are not going to align, and the cheese is going to stop the thing from slipping through the rest of the stack of Swiss cheese. And there are all these redundancies built into the system. So if one layer fails, the other layers are going to catch it. So based on your reporting, which of these layers is faltering and leading to these close calls? So what we found in our reporting was a lot of these close calls are caused by mistakes among air traffic controllers and also among pilots. And what we found was actually the

most acute challenge is the shortage of air traffic controllers across the country. Okay, so explain that. Why is there a shortage of air traffic controllers, and how is that leading to this problem of ghost calls? So the shortage in air traffic controllers has been going on for years, and it actually dates back to the early 1980s. Air traffic controllers went on strike illegally. They're federal employees. They were not supposed to strike. And President Reagan fired them. He fired thousands of them. And to replenish the ranks, the government then had to hire new air traffic controllers. And what this did was it sort of knocked off kilter the natural cycle of hiring people and having those people eventually retire at different times.

Instead, what you had was all of these controllers were hired at once, and then it created mass waves of retirement. were hired at once, and then it created mass waves of retirement. It gets a little complicated, but air traffic controllers have to retire by the age of 56, and they start becoming eligible to retire after 20 years of service. And what happened was the FAA really just couldn't keep up with these mass retirements. It started falling behind. And then the pandemic hit. And the pandemic made things just a lot worse. Why? So, of course, you had air traffic controllers who quit or retired early, as happened around the country in lots and lots of different industries. But it also slowed training.

in lots and lots of different industries, but it also slowed training. Training for air traffic controllers takes a while. It's very intense. But because of health restrictions, you couldn't train as many air traffic controllers as the FAA had to train. And so you just start falling more and more and more behind. And at this point, there are something like 10% fewer fully certified air traffic controllers than there were a decade ago. In fact, we analyzed some numbers and there are only three air traffic facilities in the country that are considered fully staffed as of May. Yeah, out of 313.

Yeah, out of 313. Sydney, the FAA presumably has had years to recognize this shortage as a natural extension of what Ronald Reagan did and to find ways to recruit to balance it out. So why hasn't that happened? Well, so the truth is that being a controller is a really, really demanding, difficult job. It's highly stressful. They are spending long, long hours staring at planes. Think about trying to keep planes apart that you know have passengers on them. And many controllers work a grueling schedule called the rattler, which is essentially rotating shifts that start earlier and earlier in the day until you get to the last day of your schedule where you work two shifts in a

24-hour period. Wow. This really messes with their sleep schedules. And if you don't have enough air traffic controllers, what ends up happening is many have to work mandatory six-day work weeks. They have to work an extra day. And this is what they say is leading to a lot of these close calls. They're just so, so exhausted mentally, physically, that they can't focus and that the focus required to be an air traffic controller, they're just unable to keep for that long. Hmm. So what about the pilots? Why are they, as a layer of safety in the system, under strain right now when it comes to close calls? So during the pandemic, you might remember that air traffic tanked.

No one wanted to fly on planes. And airlines started furloughing their pilots and encouraging their older pilots to retire. And what happened was these older experienced pilots, a lot of them did retire. And what happened was these older experienced pilots, a lot of them did retire. And to replenish those ranks, the major carriers started drawing on regional airline pilots and the experience level in the cockpits decreased. So if you think about a 16-year-old driver versus a 45-year-old driver, the 16-year-old driver is going to be more prone to making mistakes. This is what people in the industry tell us, that on average, the experience level of pilots is a little lower. They're a little less seasoned. So they're just more prone to

making mistakes. But according to the Swiss cheese safety model, if I'm understanding what you told me correctly, Sydney, an inexperienced pilot shouldn't be a huge problem if they make an error because the next layer is supposed to catch them, you know, the air traffic controller. And even if that air traffic controller is overstretched or tired, they should have their error caught by a pilot, even if they are a little bit less experienced than in the past, right? I mean, that's the thinking. That's right.

But what you can see is if you have less seasoned pilots in the cockpit and you have overworked, those holes in each layer of the Swiss cheese are getting bigger and they're more likely to align. The mistake is going to slip through both layers. Take a recent incident in Phoenix that occurred in early August. A controller gave an instruction to a pilot on an American Airlines plane about the departure route he was supposed to take after he took off from the runway, and the pilot repeated the instructions back incorrectly. The air traffic controller didn't hear the incorrect readback,

and so the American plane takes off, and instead of turning right, it turns left. At the same time, a Southwest plane had taken off, and so this American plane is now turning into the path of the Southwest plane. American 1388, Phoenix departure, verify 4P1 departure. We actually have the audio of when another controller realizes what's happening. American 1388, traffic alert, 9 o'clock, less than a mile, Boeing 737-3000. Do you have the traffic in sight?

Yeah, we have it. We're at 1388. It can sound kind of confusing. The controller is repeating things to the pilot. The pilots are repeating it back. I'm sitting right there. Do you see the traffic? Yeah, we're at 1388.

But what you really note is the urgency in the controller's voice. He tells the Southwest plane, turn if you need to. And eventually, the planes do start diverging. They do turn away from each other. And the original sin in this situation is kind of a worst-case scenario for this multilayered system because you have an error by a pilot not being caught by that first controller, a kind of double failure. Exactly. And what happened was these planes got so close together, they got a third of a mile

horizontally and 300 feet vertically to each other, which with planes going hundreds of miles per hour is so, so dangerously close. Okay. So then, Sydney, we get to the next layer of this safety system, what you call the technology that is supposed to keep these planes apart. What's the story there, and why is it potentially contributing to the close calls? and why is it potentially contributing to the close calls? So most importantly, there is technology that alerts air traffic controllers to potential collisions. This is surface detection technology. But the problem there is that it's only at 43 airports in the country out of roughly 500 that serve commercial airlines. Why so few? So it's very expensive to install, millions of dollars.

And it's also old. And the FAA says they're looking for newer technology. But the result of not having this technology at so many airports is close calls around runways. And you can see this, for instance, in Austin, in the example that I mentioned earlier involving the FedEx and Southwest planes that got really close to each other. Austin doesn't have this service technology, and that, people say, is one of the reasons these planes did get so close to each other before the FedEx pilot pulled up and avoided a collision.

so close to each other before the FedEx pilot pulled up and avoided a collision. And then there's another piece of technology that is really, really important on commercial airlines. This technology is basically a collision avoidance technology. If two planes are getting too close to each other or are looking like they're going to get too close to each other, this technology blares in the cockpit and either alerts the pilot to potential traffic or tells the pilot to climb or descend if the planes are getting too close to each other. So, Sydney, what is and what can be done to address all these strains? Because everything you've told us suggests that the FAA knows about all these close calls. So why haven't they done more to try to prevent them?

Well, it really comes down to money. They would love to be able to hire more controllers, but it costs money. They want to be able to install more technology on runways, but that also costs money. And they submit budget requests to Congress every year. But in the end, it's the money that they get. This is what they would tell us. But even with these measures that they are saying they want to take, people tell us that this is just not enough. The shortage in air traffic controllers is so severe that the number of air traffic controllers that the FAA wants to hire with the money that they

have is not going to solve the problem. The technology on runways is old and they need to find new technology. They say that they are working on that, but that could be years from being installed. So there's a lot of frustration right now among pilots and among air traffic controllers that they want attention on this. They want the public to know that close calls are happening and they want the FAA to do more. Which makes sense. And Sydney, what's so interesting and important about the investigation that you and Emily Steele did is that it's coming before a deadly tragedy. So often in journalism, we do this kind of reporting after something terrible happens. And here, you're finding that people are trying to ring the alarms and are ringing the alarms before and in anticipation of a tragedy, which means that there is really an opportunity to prevent something

awful from happening. Yeah, there is an opportunity here. But what a lot of people we talked to said was they are worried that nothing is going to happen or that the FAA is not going to do enough. is not going to do enough. There's this sort of very, very cynical take, which is that the FAA in some circles is known as the tombstone agency. That is, they won't do anything until something catastrophic does occur, until people do die. The people we talk to say there really is no excuse for the FAA not to do something before one of these close calls leads to a fatal crash. Sydney, thank you very much. We appreciate it. Thank you, Michael. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today.

On Monday, Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky pushed out his defense minister, the biggest shakeup in the leadership of Ukraine's war effort since Russia invaded the country last year. The move is significant because the defense minister, Alexei Reznikov, has been a close advisor to Zelensky and a public face of Ukraine's battle against Russia. Zelensky did not specify why he was replacing Reznikov, but the decision comes amid widening corruption investigations into the mishandling of military contracts related to the war. Meanwhile, the U.S. revealed that the leader of North Korea, Kim Jong-un, plans to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin to discuss the possibility of supplying Russia with more weaponry for its war against Ukraine. The U.S. hopes that by exposing such an arrangement, it will discourage North Korea from following through with an arms deal to Russia, a strategy that has worked in the past. Today's episode was produced by Alex Stern, Stella Tan, Rob Zipko, and Shannon Lin.

It was edited by Lexi Dio, contains original music by Mary Lozano and Dan Powell, and was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landverk of Wonderly. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.