‘Near Disaster’ Involving 5 Planes at JFK Has People Wondering What Is Going On

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Though air travel still maintains the standard as the safest mode of travel, at least for now, with all of 2024's air travel chaos, it feels like that safety is slipping. Most of the conversation has been focused on airplane manufacturers and airlines themselves. After all, the year started off with a bang with all of Boeing's drama, followed closely behind by United Airlines' marathon run of mechanical incidents. But safety slippage is present not only within the planes, but up in the ATC towers as well.

A couple of coinciding clearance calls made by air traffic control at JFK led to a near-disaster last week, one that has the FAA deeply concerned. Far too many "near-miss" runway incidents involve two planes, but this one involved five .

According to @abcworldnews , on April 17, an air traffic controller at JFK Airport cleared Swiss Air Flight 17 for takeoff, not realizing that air traffic control had just cleared four other planes to cross over that runway! Even more chilling, it wasn't ATC who realized their near-deadly mistake, but the Swiss Air flight's captain. The observant pilot noticed the line of planes moving down the runway in his direction, realized what was going on, and made the decision to abort takeoff himself, preventing what could have been a major disaster.

Related: American Airlines Pilots Get Real About Concerning Safety Issues in Aviation

Swiss Air commended their fast-acting pilot and his team, praising them for de-escalating a "potentially dangerous situation." On a more troubling note, this incident reflects a dangerous trend in bad ATC calls that led to a number of near misses and even minor runway collisions back in 2023. Though things seemed to settle down for a few months, that quiet streak was broken last week when two planes nearly collided at DCA Airport after being cleared to cross the same runway. And now, there's this incident as well- one that involved three aircraft more than the near-miss at DCA.

Improving Safety in the ATC Towers

After the DCA incident last week, I touched on the subject of how the government is working to improve air traffic control safety and efficiency. One of the biggest issues with air traffic control is that it's a high-stress, understaffed field with long hours and little time to recover physically and mentally between shifts. Controllers are exhausted and pushed to a mental breaking point, leading to more frequent errors and bad calls.

Last week, the FAA announced that they would implement longer rest times between shifts and push to hire more air traffic controllers, improvements which FAA Administrator Mike Whitaker claims are the first step in a " sustained effort to address controller fatigue and ensure our airspace is the safest in the world."

Fatigue isn't the only factor here, though. Many American airports operate with outdated ATC technology, something that Business Airport International highlighted in a January report after members of Airlines 4 America spoke out about these faltering systems. A4A CEO Nick Calio pointed out that hundreds of American ATC facilities still use floppy disks to upload data, and track flights with paper strips instead of digital tech.

As with the chronic fatigue problem too, the FAA is making moves to address this problem, working to modernize outdated ATC infrastructure through the implementation of their NextGen Initiative . But the wheels of change turn slowly, and though promising changes are coming soon, air traffic controllers are struggling now, leading to dangerous calls like the one at JFK. Tangible systemic progress needs to be made soon if we hope to maintain the high standards of safety that American air travel has previously set.

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