Acting FAA Administrator Billy Nolen testifies at a Senate committee hearing earlier this month. (Photo: Mariam Zuhaib)
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On the eve of a safety summit called by the Federal Aviation Administration to look into a string of airplane near-collisions this year, the agency’s acting chief Billy Nolen acknowledged to NBC Nightly News anchor Lester Holt that while it remains safe to fly, officials have grown concerned to “see things that we don’t expect to see.”
While there has not been a major fatal U.S. passenger airline crash since February 2009, a number of recent close calls that have given pause to officials as well as the flying public.
In January of this year, the FAA assessed three runway incursions as having “significant potential for collision.” On January 9 in Santa Barbara, air traffic control cleared a plane to land in the same location where a plane was already being inspected. Three days later at Baltimore/Washington International Airport, a plane crossed the wrong runway after air traffic control did not notice the pilot’s misunderstanding. And on the following day, January 13, at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, A Delta plane aborted its takeoff after an American Airlines plane crossed its path.
Two of the incidents that occurred in February involved a passenger landing plane forced to take evasive action to avoid another plane on the runway.
On March 6, two United Airlines planes clipped each other on the tarmac at Boston’s Logan International Airport. The next day, at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, a Republic Airways plane crossed a runway without clearance, entering the path of a United Airlines flight that had already been cleared for takeoff.
Nolen called the spate of near-misses a “cluster,” adding that “we’ve seen over this last few months more than you’d expect to see.”
The FAA is also contending with antiquated technology. In January, the agency grounded all domestic flights for several hours due to an outage of the agency’s 30-year-old Notice to Air Missions system, known as NOTAM. Following a brief investigation, the agency blamed the outage on “a damaged database file” by a contractor “who failed to follow procedures.”
Nolen told NBC that these incidents are a red flag to slow down. They “give us a moment to say, ‘Let’s stop, let’s reflect, let’s ask ourselves the questions: Are we missing anything? Is there anything that we should be doing different?’ And remind ourselves always that we can never become complacent and never take this incredible safety record for granted.”
The acting FAA administrator has been in the political hot seat lately, testifying to the Senate Commerce Committee twice in as many months.
In February, Nolen wrote a “call to action” memo to agency staff, announcing that a team of experts would review airline safety and “which mitigations are working and why others appear to be not as effective as they once were.”
The safety summit will begin on Wednesday morning. “Let’s go pressure test our assumptions,” Nolen said.