A commercial air carrier jet was preparing for an early-morning landing at Oakland International Airport in July of 2023 when the pilots, flying by instruments due to poor visibility, got an alert from the jet’s electronic collision avoidance system — another plane was rapidly approaching at a distance the pilot later described as “within 300 feet of us.”
“I directed a more aggressive climb,” the plane’s captain later reported, “due to aircraft appearing to continue to climb into us.”
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Two years earlier on a June afternoon, a passenger jet was taking off from San Jose International Airport when the pilots got an electronic warning of another plane on a potential collision course only 100 feet below. That plane took evasive action to avoid a crash.
Neither close call ended in disaster, but both were reported to a database of “near midair collision” incidents maintained by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Though midair collisions such as last month’s tragedy near the nation’s capital involving a passenger jet and military helicopter are exceedingly rare, pilots for commercial carriers report an unnerving number of near midair collisions across the U.S. each year, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation.
As authorities Tuesday finished retrieving the remains of the 67 victims of the Jan. 30 collision between a passenger jet and military helicopter near Reagan National Airport, the cause remains under investigation. But the incident has surfaced long-simmering concerns among aviation experts about the nation’s crowded skies and whether there is sufficient staffing at air traffic control towers to safely manage them.
“These near misses are extremely common,” said Ross Aimer, a retired United Airlines Captain who’s now CEO of Aero Consulting Experts in Los Angeles. “I’m afraid this gets worse and worse as we go along and demand for air travel increases. … But we do have the technology, and on top of that, we have extremely dedicated air traffic controllers and pilots that perform miracles every day and prevent things like this from happening.”
Department of Transportation figures show dozens of pilot-reported near midair collisions each year over the last two decades, from eight in 2008 to 90 in 2017. There were 24 in 2020, the most recent year for which the department reported figures.
NASA’s Aviation Safety Reporting System database indicates that since 2000, pilots have reported four near midair collisions near San Francisco International — all of them within the last three years and two involving drones. At Oakland, in addition to the July 2023 incident, there was another with a drone reported in June of 2016. And at San Jose, in addition to the June 2021 incident, there was another in September of 2018 and two others involving drones, in August of 2023 and September of 2019.
An Oakland airport representative referred questions about the incidents to the Federal Aviation Administration, which said it could not comment. Doug Yakel, spokesman for San Francisco International, noted that NASA’s database is “a voluntary reporting system whose reports are not independently corroborated” and that it is the FAA that determines whether a close call actually occurred, and the severity.
San Jose airport spokeswoman Ana Maria State said the reports “include observations of potential safety concerns that have not resulted in actual incidents but are flagged for corrective action,” and that NASA notifies the airport in cases involving airport procedures to improve safety.
Midair collisions involving commercial passenger jets are quite rare. Before last month’s tragedy, U.S. midair collisions involving passenger jets included an Aeroméxico DC-9 clipped by a single-engine Piper propeller plane over Los Angeles in 1986 that killed 82 people, and a Pacific Southwest Airlines Boeing 727 struck by a Cesna single-engine propeller plane over San Diego in 1978 that killed 144.
Rep. Mark DeSaulnier, a Concord Democrat who has been a leading airline safety advocate since 2017 when an Air Canada plane nearly landed on four fully loaded passenger planes in San Francisco, said in an interview with the Bay Area News Group that the Washington crash “is a sobering reminder that although flying is incredibly safe in the United States, we can always do better.”
Concerns about the potential for disaster in America’s crowded skies have grown as passenger travel has increased while few new airports have opened and air traffic controller staffing has slipped. The number of passengers on U.S. flights since the COVID-19 pandemic has surpassed pre-pandemic levels and reached a 20-year high.
The FAA has struggled to replace retiring air traffic controllers in recent years, with about 1,000 fewer certified air traffic controllers across the U.S. in 2023 than a decade earlier, a nearly 9% decrease.
“We’re always short of good, qualified air traffic controllers,” Aimer said. “As the older ones retire, replacing them becomes harder because there’s a lot of training going into becoming an air traffic controller.”
Technology such as TCAS — Traffic Collision Avoidance System — helps warns the pilot of approaching danger, Aimer said.
“But unfortunately, that system is designed not to basically bother the pilots in very short finals and below a certain altitude,” Aimer said, which would not have been operable in the Washington National crash. “These fellows were around 300 to 400 feet on the final approach, and the system goes kind of silent below 1,000 feet.”
The failure to develop more U.S. airports to keep up with passenger traffic has meant more flights are squeezing into the same locations, increasing the potential for disaster, Aimer added.
“We’re just extremely congested,” he said.
Washington National is one of the busiest and most restrictive airspaces in the world. But similar issues affect other airports including in the Bay Area, where Aimer flew in and out of San Francisco for much of his career.
DeSaulnier said that “it is too early to answer the specific human-factor issues that might be relevant” to the cause of the Washington, D.C., crash. But he said its painful lessons will lead to further safety improvements.
“We listen to experts about what reforms and modernizations are needed to make us safer,” DeSaulnier said. “We learn from our mistakes so that the safety of the flying public is protected from coast to coast.”