An American Airlines flight landing at DCA aborted and made a go-around because another airplane was taking off from the same runway.
A Southwest Airlines flight landing at MDW aborted and made a go-around because a business jet was taxiing across the runway it was about to land on.
Over my years of business travel, I’ve experienced two aborted landings due to ground traffic, one so abrupt the G-force made my face feel like it was melting into the seat. I think the pilots were having fun. Good times.
I fly into DCA all the time. I was there a few weeks ago and I’ll be there in March and April. I wish JetBlue didn’t discontinue service to IAD because I’d much rather land there.
Sure hope we are not firing the ATCs. We need more and better equipment.
We’ve been lucky.
Here is the video of the Southwest jet on final approach to Chicago Midway that had to do a go around when a small executive jet crossed the runway right in front of it.
@busdriver11, I would love your reaction to the video. Don’t those engines take several seconds to spool up to full power?
Note that the small jet was given repeated instructions to stop short of the runway, but didn’t do so.
Maybe @busdriver11 can lend some wisdom here:
I’ve listened to a bunch of CVR recordings involving near-misses or bad behavior by crew, and often toward the end of the tape, after the plane has landed or whatever issue is more or less resolved, ATC will say something like, “PanAm 823, contact ATC center at 555-823-6754.” And I imagine they’re about to get yelled at/disciplined. (and it’s usually an actual phone number, not a radio frequency…)
Is that what happens?
Yeah, that is usually not a good sign. You do not want to hear that as it’s usually because you screwed up. The one time in my entire career, they told me that at San Diego, after I requested an opposite direction approach in low visibility conditions, after asking why I requested a different runway. Two pilots jumped on the radio to confirm what I told them, that the weather was at minimums and it was essential to land on the runway with the ILS. We would have all had to do a go around and end up diverting to LAX if that wasn’t an option.
Long story short, on the phone they apologized for the delay in the runway change (about 15 min, but we had the gas) and explained that they had to move equipment around. So no yelling at me, whew!
It is an alarming video, that’s for sure. But no, it doesn’t take that long for engines to spool up, and you don’t have to wait for them to spool up completely to do a go around. The go around procedure is considered a “balls to the wall” procedure, full power, nose up immediately afterwards. You have at least idle power while landing, and generally you’re carrying a little extra. Go arounds can be incredibly confusing and challenging, with a lot of things going on at the same time, but it looks like this crew did a great job, and if they heard the controller talking to the other airplane, the potential conflict might have already been on their radar.
You’re always supposed to talk about a potential go around and be ready for it.
Do jet airplane crew refer to the fuel as “gas(oline)” rather than the jet fuel (that is more like diesel fuel) that it is?
I’d say most of the people I work with just called it “fuel” or “gas”. As in, “We’re getting low on fuel”, or to operations, “Need to add some gas”. Just a generic term, everyone knows what you’re talking about. Some people like to be fancy and call it “Petro”.
One of my favorite mantras was, “Fuel trumps brains”, meaning, you can do all sorts of machinations trying to figure out exactly how much fuel you need, but you really don’t know exactly what will happen. If I had any question about a flight/mission, I’d just add gas. Easy peasy, don’t have to think to much about it. Usually not necessary, but sometimes it served me very well.
I have a question for you. Have there always been this number of “near misses” and we’re just hearing more about them right now because there’s been two crashes recently or is this actually an unusually high amount?
Last year, it seemed like there was a report of a near miss almost every night on the CBS Evening News. Then the reports tapered off.
Yes. This is nothing new, not getting worse, you’re just hearing about it now. But consider there are a number of things keeping you safe. There are pilots from each aircraft, air traffic controllers, and fantastic equipment on most aircraft that will scream out at you to do something if you get too close.Still much safer than driving your car to the airport.
I’ve never understood couples who won’t fly on the same plane in case there’s a crash, but have no hesitation driving cross country together.
It’s just having a sense of control. I’m a scared flyer - I do it and wouldn’t insist my spouse and I take different planes, but I hate it. I understand the statistics, but I feel much safer in a car.
That’s so fascinating to me. Cars terrify me, because I know the statistics. And we’ve had so many wrong-way drivers up here. Boom, somebody dies instantly because a guy is going southbound in a northbound lane. 
There is NO control in that situation.
Sort of a side tangent, but I once read a letter to the editor after such a death, where the writer taught his teenager daughter how to quickly pull off the side of the road where there’s no defined shoulder in case of such an incident. As I recall, it was a lengthy learning process with several steps. Not long after she got her license, she was in such a situation and was able to pull off and stop safely.
Of course, many of our county roads don’t have shoulders wide enough (even unpaved) before the ditch, but I guess in this case it did. Edit - or maybe she learned how to slow and get a wheel into the ditch without flipping. I forget the details. But I was very impressed! County roads scare me. Constant blind hills/curves and no shoulder and a 55mph speed limit and deer everywhere. You live in the county, you’ll hit a deer at least once.
We’ve hit a deer and a moose. The moose collision was terrifying. The state trooper said we were darned lucky we were in a Tahoe and not a small car. Just a few weeks ago, I was driving with my son and all of a sudden a HERD of deer came barreling down the road towards us! It felt like an obstacle course. I can’t believe I didn’t hit any of them. (OK, back on topic now…)
She was fortunate. My dear childhood friend who became a minister and performed our wedding ceremony was killed a couple of years ago by a wrong-way drive on the entrance ramp to the freeway. There was no shoulder, nowhere to go. It was a death trap.
And now this. “A FedEx cargo plane made an emergency landing at a busy New Jersey airport on Saturday after a bird strike caused an engine fire that could be seen in the morning sky.”