It was a chilly winter evening when disaster nearly struck. A little after 6 p.m. on February 18, 2007, a Northwest Airlink commuter plane was making a routine descent into Memphis International Airport when a cockpit warning light flashed. Something was wrong with the landing gear, and the pilot decided to abort. He radioed the tower to let controllers know he would be executing a “go-around,” ascending and then, if the equipment checked out, attempting to land again. There was only one problem: Another plane, a Northwest Airlines DC-9 nearly twice the size of the commuter plane, was heading into the same airspace.
“Stay low, stay low!” a frantic air traffic controller ordered the commuter pilot while instructing the DC-9 to reach for the sky. The smaller aircraft flew down the length of the runway while the pilot of the larger one pulled back the stick and climbed. Horrified controllers watched helplessly as the planes raced along converging paths. They missed colliding by a scant 500 feet.
“I had never seen two airplanes fly that close to each other,” says Peter Nesbitt, a controller with more than 20 years of experience who was on duty that night.
The increase of air traffic into the Memphis hub made this a disaster waiting to happen, Nesbitt says. The real problem was the layout of the runways: Three run parallel to one another like neat rows of corn, but a fourth is perpendicular. If everything goes perfectly, an aircraft landing on the fourth runway is already taxiing on the ground as other planes pass overhead. If there is any kind of hitch, though, a flight landing on that last runway could get dangerously close to another plane.
In the two years that he worked in the Memphis control tower, Nesbitt—who had transferred from Austin, Texas—repeatedly complained to his superiors about the dangerous approach pattern. But they assured him they had a special waiver from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). When he and other controllers asked to see it, they were told it was kept in Atlanta and that they need not worry. “They would never give us a copy and would never let us see it,” he recalls. “If you’re insubordinate and question it, then you’ll lose your job.”
The near crash in February 2007 hardened Nesbitt’s resolve to take action. “After witnessing that event, I felt compelled to get to the bottom of this, and if the procedure was illegal, to put an end to it,” he recalls. The minute he got a break later that night, he filled out a NASA aviation safety report. And three days later, he fired off a blistering e-mail to the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) about the controversial landing procedure. Many controllers “have recounted horror stories of these aircraft flying through the flight paths of [other] aircraft,” he wrote in his report. But his air traffic manager insisted on using the procedure, he continued, “because it helps the users make money. We are placing profit over safety against the objections of many controllers who are forced to deal with this unsafe situation on a daily basis.”
Nesbitt was not prepared for what happened next. He was branded a troublemaker, his every move was closely monitored, and he was eventually decertified from all but one position in the tower, a job he characterizes as “essentially a secretary,” issuing route clearances to aircraft before they take off. His career was almost derailed because he blew the whistle.
The terrifying incident on the tarmac in Memphis is not a single cautionary event but a snapshot of a disturbing trend. About 30 times a year, on average, aircraft in the United States narrowly miss each other during landing or takeoff. (Overall, runway incidents increased 13 percent from 2007 to 2008.) “When you look at some of the close calls—and in a couple of cases they were literally seconds away from having two planes collide—accidents were avoided only by pilot decision,” says William Waldock, associate director of the Center for Aerospace Safety Education at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott, Arizona. “Eventually, someone will slip up and we will have a catastrophic crash.”
These so-called runway incursions are symptoms of a larger problem: the deterioration of the nation’s air traffic infrastructure. Air traffic guidance systems are antiquated. Some have not been upgraded since Jimmy Carter was president, and others are glued together with technology developed for use in World War II.
Dangerous outages may cut off communication between the tower and the plane. Moreover, like Memphis International, many American airports are old and congested, lacking enough runways to handle current air traffic loads. The system is also burdened by an acute shortage of experienced air traffic controllers, who have been locked in a bitter contract dispute with the FAA and retiring in record numbers, leaving those who remain exhausted and overworked. Despite its many problems, the system still functions remarkably well, but with the FAA predicting that airline passenger traffic could jump from about 757 million in 2008 to 1 billion by 2021, close calls and alarming accidents may soon become the norm.
“The navigation system hasn’t gotten to the point where we have to worry about getting on an airplane,” says John Goglia, an aviation industry analyst and former member of the NTSB. “But there is definitely increased risk.”
In the face of all this, fresh blood in Washington has strategized a technological overhaul of the nation’s airspace system, under the catchall rubric of NextGen, to be phased in over the next decade. The question is this: Will the new technology ramp up and take over before the current infrastructure erodes so far that statistical risk translates into lives lost?
