Federal authorities are investigating two jets that appeared to narrowly avoid a collision at Midway Airport, as a string of recent aviation disasters has caused public confidence in air safety to start to waver.
Around 8:50 a.m. Tuesday, a Southwest plane aborted a landing when a business jet entered the runway without authorization, according to the Federal Aviation Administration, which is investigating the incident.
Video circulating on social media shows a dramatic reversal of plans by the Southwest plane. The larger commercial plane appears to nearly touch down on the runway when the smaller jet begins to cross in front of it. The Southwest plane immediately pulls up and returns to the sky, while the smaller plane proceeds across the runway, the video shows.
It was unclear Tuesday afternoon exactly how close the two planes got. But it was not the first time in recent years planes have come so close to colliding at Midway that the FAA took note.
“This reflects the extremely crowded skies that we have,” said travel industry analyst Henry Harteveldt.
Aborted landings, known in aviation as a “go around,” remain relatively unusual, and pilots train extensively to handle those and other safety situations, Harteveldt said.
Still, FAA records describe a string of other runway incidents at Midway in the past two years that brought commercial jets, small planes, helicopters and vehicles unusually close together at the Southwest Side’s bustling, landlocked airport. In some cases, planes were forced to abort takeoffs or landings.
In August, a helicopter was approved to fly over a Midway runway as a Boeing 737 was told to get in position to take off. The helicopter passed over the plane lower than authorized, coming within 200 feet, according to FAA documents.
In July, a small, single-engine light plane began to enter a runway as a Boeing 737 was rolling to take off. The light plane had been told to stop short of the runway, and as it moved closer to the runway air traffic controllers broadcast for the plane to stop. The two planes came within 167 feet of each other, FAA records show.
In April, air traffic controllers “did not provide runway separation” between two Boeing 737s, the documents note. One of the planes was cleared to take off from the same runway where the other was cleared to land. The departing plane was already airborne when the landing plane crossed the runway threshold, the documents note, but the two jets came within 5,231 feet of each other.
In another example, in December 2023, a helicopter was given clearance to cross over the airfield and land, as a Boeing 737 was inbound to the airport, the FAA records show. Air traffic controllers “did not attempt to apply runway separation” between the two, and the plane approached the runway as the helicopter flew over. The two came within 1,587 feet.
The Chicago Department of Aviation, which manages the city’s two airports, referred questions to the FAA, which is responsible for air traffic control and investigating situations involving movement of aircraft. But the department works with federal agencies to “enhance safety measures and implement infrastructure improvements that support safe and efficient operations at Midway,” officials said in a statement.
The FAA has undertaken an audit of the risk of such runway incidents, known in the industry as runway incursions, at the 45 busiest airports in the U.S., including both Midway and Chicago’s larger O’Hare International Airport. The audit is expected to be finished early this year, agency officials said in a statement. It will include a “risk profile” for each airport, identify any gaps contributing to the risk and make safety recommendations.
The work came out of a review of the nation’s air system undertaken as near-collisions between planes gained attention, including high-profile cases at airports in San Diego and Austin, Texas, in 2023.
More recently, a series of U.S. crashes has left some travelers rattled, including the January midair collision in Washington, D.C., between an American Airlines passenger jet and an Army helicopter that killed everyone aboard both aircraft. It was the deadliest plane crash in the U.S. since Nov. 12, 2001, and the first deadly crash of any kind involving a U.S. airliner since February 2009.
Days later, on Jan. 31, a medical transportation plane crashed in Philadelphia not long after taking off from a small airport, killing six people aboard and one person on the ground. In early February, a single-engine turboprop commuter flight crashed on Alaska sea ice, killing 10 aboard.
Later in February, a Delta plane arriving at Toronto’s Pearson Airport from Minneapolis flipped and landed on its roof. All those injured were later released from the hospital.
Air traffic controllers at airport towers have sophisticated software to manage landings and runway crossings, making situations like the near-collision Tuesday at Midway unusual, Harteveldt said. When they do happen, pilots have been trained extensively to know how to handle them.
“They spend time and they train so that when incidents like this occur, they have checklists to follow, they know exactly what to do, and they follow the instructions,” he said.
Harteveldt also cautioned in some situations, what appears to be alarming to a layperson might not be a problem because the control tower or the pilots of two aircraft might be aware of each other.
When it comes to aborted landings, the reasons a pilot might “go around” could be many, he said. A pilot might see what looks like debris on a runway, or an earlier flight could be departing slower than expected.
Another plane could be crossing a runway or be located too close. That can happen if there is a delay in action on the part of a pilot by even a few seconds, which could put a plane in the wrong place on the runway at the wrong time, he said.
“Seconds literally do matter at crowded airports like Midway,” he said.
In the close call Tuesday, the FAA noted the business jet entered the runway without authorization.
Still, while plane crashes remain rare, an AP-NORC poll found public confidence in air travel had begun to slip, though a majority of the public continued to think air travel is safe. The poll, taken in early February before the Toronto plane crash, found 64% of U.S. adults said plane travel was “very safe” or “somewhat safe,” down slightly from 71% who said that the year before.
The poll also found about 2 in 10 adults said air transportation is very or somewhat unsafe, up from 12% in a poll taken in 2024. The poll last year took place shortly after a panel blew off an Alaska Airlines jet in another incident that raised questions about air travel safety.
Air safety drew further scrutiny in recent days as the Trump administration’s staff cuts reached the FAA. President Donald Trump’s administration has said no one with a “critical safety” position at the agency was fired, but some FAA jobs that were eliminated had direct roles supporting safety inspectors and airport operations, according to their union and former employees.
The cuts have drawn scrutiny from the Illinois congressional delegation, including Sen. Tammy Duckworth, who sent a letter last week to acting FAA Administrator Chris Rocheleau demanding further information about the positions cut and the rationale for the cuts. Tuesday, U.S. Rep. Jesús “Chuy” Garcia said on X he would be pressing for a full investigation of the near collision at Midway and noted “this is why cuts to the FAA are dangerous.”
Though administration officials have said no air traffic controllers have been cut, a shortage of controllers has plagued the nation’s air system for years, and Chicago has not been immune. As of September 2023, the most recent published data available, air traffic control facilities at the city’s two airports and two other regional centers failed to meet a working group’s staffing targets, though the shortages were not as acute as those in some other major cities such as New York.
At that time, the air traffic control tower at O’Hare had 57 fully certified controllers, out of a working group target of 73. Midway had 19 of a recommended 22. The FAA also set its own targets that differ from the working group’s, and by those standards the towers at O’Hare and Midway exceeded FAA staffing targets.
But the published data is old, and losing even one air traffic controller in an airport tower can affect operations, especially if it’s during a peak time of day, Harteveldt, the industry analyst, said.
Tuesday at Midway, the Southwest flight ultimately landed safely, airline executives noted in a statement.
“The crew followed safety procedures, and the flight landed without incident,” they said.
The Associated Press contributed
