Federal officials have begun investigating a close call between planes in Boston, and they provided new details Thursday about a harrowing incident at an airport in Texas.
The National Transportation Safety Board said it has not determined exactly how close a FedEx cargo plane passed over the top of a Southwest Airlines jet last month in Austin, Texas, but there was little margin.
“We still believe the planes were within 100 feet of each other,” NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy said in an interview.
An air traffic controller had cleared both planes to use the same runway, the NTSB said in a preliminary report. With visibility down to a quarter-mile because of freezing fog, the FedEx pilots didn’t see the Southwest jet until the last seconds.
The NTSB is also investigating an incident Monday night at Boston’s Logan International Airport in which a Learjet pilot who was told by an air traffic controller to wait instead began to take off as a JetBlue plane approached to land on an intersecting runway. The JetBlue pilots pulled up, avoiding a collision.