A commercial airliner and a cargo plane came perilously close to colliding on intersecting runways at Newark Liberty International Airport during an aborted landing on Tuesday.
The close call involved an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 that flew over a FedEx Boeing 777 at the busy New York City-area airport. The two planes were just 300 feet apart.
According to the FAA, an air traffic controller instructed Alaska Airlines Flight 294, arriving from Portland, Oregon, to perform a “go around” – meaning to discontinue its landing approach and circle for a new attempt.
This instruction was issued because FedEx Flight 721, originating from Memphis, Tennessee, had already been cleared for a final approach to an intersecting runway.
Alaska Airlines said that the flight was cleared to land at Newark.
Air traffic control “issued a go around to our aircraft, which our pilots are highly trained for,” the airline said in a statement.
FedEx also released a statement, saying that its flight crew “followed instructions from air traffic control and landed safely.”
According to FlightRadar 24, the two jets were as close as 300 feet away from each other.
Former FAA official Michael McCormick chalked the problem up to Newark’s intersecting runways.
“It is a challenge for a tower controller to try to get that timing perfect, it doesn’t always work and that’s what happened in this case, so the tower controller waited and unfortunately, in my opinion, too long and they had to send the aircraft on a go-around,” he told ABC New York.
On March 3, a Singapore Airlines aircraft clipped the wings of a Spirit Airlines plane at the same airport.
This incident occurred as the partial government shutdown continues to create staffing shortages at airports nationwide.
A series of serious close-call incidents in 2023 prompted Congress to hold hearings that raised questions about the FAA's air traffic control operations. That prompted the FAA to take steps to improve its air traffic control operations, which remain short-staffed.
A January 2025 mid-air collision between an American Airlines regional jet and an Army helicopter near Reagan Washington National Airport killed 67 people and again raised questions about the FAA's safety performance, prompting the NTSB to issue dozens of recommendations.
Earlier this week, the FAA said it was barring helicopter traffic near major airports operating under visual separation and requiring air traffic controllers to use radar to keep the aircraft apart.
The incident is now under review by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).
Reuters contributed this report.
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