The recent rash of deadly accidents and close calls at U.S. airports already struggling with an air traffic controller shortage and hundreds of federal layoffs has many travelers — and even some folks on the ground — worried about the next disaster.
While public awareness of even minor mishaps involving airplanes has never greater, aviation experts tell The Independent that air travel is the still the statistically safest form of transportation.
But they also warn that there’s a flaw in high-tech safety systems used at airfields across the country — one that may have fueled the devastating runway collision that killed two pilots at New York City’s LaGuardia Airport in March.
“It’s an existing gap, and it needs to be closed,” said retired airline captain-turned-safety consultant John Cox,, who’s testified before Congress and the National Transportation Safety Board.
The issue involves relatively inexpensive electronic transponders that let air traffic controllers track the movement of vehicles on the ground, which the Federal Aviation Administration has urged airports to adopt since 2011, but has never made mandatory.
In addition to the LaGuardia collision, the spate of incidents includes the harrowing, caught-on-camera moment when a plane carrying 231 passengers and crew clipped a light pole and bread truck on the New Jersey Turnpike while approaching Newark Airport.
The truck driver, Donald Boardly Jr. of Baltimore, miraculously survived with minor injuries after the Boeing 737’s landing gear apparently smashed into the cab of the bakery delivery truck he was driving on May 3. “He described total fear that he wouldn’t walk away from it,” his father, Donald Boardly Sr., later told reporters, according to nj.com. “He thought he’d be decapitated.”
Retired United Airlines captain Steve Arroyo, who was based in Newark and used the same route to safely land there “dozens of times” during his careers, said the plane was obviously “below the glide path” for a landing with “narrow margins” for safety.
“They came within inches of a major catastrophe,” he said.
The next day, a regional flight from Rochester, New York, came within 500 feet of a single-engine propeller plane flying overhead as they crossed paths while landing at New York City’s Kennedy Airport, according to local TV station WABC.
That near miss came just two weeks after an April 20 incident at Kennedy during which cockpit alarms sounded when a plane that was attempting to land missed its approach and veered into the path of another that was forced to abort its landing and climb 3,000 feet to avoid a midair collision.
And that followed a similar incident two days earlier at Tennessee’s Nashville Airport, as well as a March 24 close call involving a military Black Hawk helicopter and a Boeing 737 at John Wayne Airport in Santa Ana, California, that evoked memories of the 67 people killed last year when a Black Hawk and a regional jet collided over the Potomac River in Washington, D.C., near Reagan Airport.
More recently, a grisly accident took place at Denver Airport, where a suicidal man climbed over a fence and walked onto a runway where he was fatally sucked into a plane’s engine as it was attempting to take off on May 8, igniting a fire and causing minor injuries to 12 people on board.
The most recent commercial aviation statistics released by the NTSB show that accidents in the U.S. during 2008-2024 ranged from a high of 91 in 2008 to a low of 59 in 2020, when airline traffic declined dramatically due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
