Corporate Plane Came Within 1.6 Miles Of Landing Traffic
Officials are investigating why a Piaggio turboprop made a wrong
turn on takeoff from Hawthorne Municipal Airport in Los Angeles
last month, and strayed too close to two airliners on final
approach to land at LAX.
The Los Angeles Times reports the chartered plane, an Avanti,
was instructed to turn left on departure from HHR on the morning of
June 13, a common vector to avoid the Class B airspace surrounding
LAX, located two miles to the northwest.
Instead, the Avanti's pilot read back the instruction as a right
turn... and the HHR tower controller did not correct the error. The
turboprop wound up flying within 1.7 miles of a Skywest regional
jet at the same altitude, and within about 1.6 miles of a Northwest
747 flying 400 feet lower.
"There was a severe loss of separation," said FAA spokesman Mike
Fergus. "The required safety buffer between aircraft was violated."
Mike Foote, area representative for the National Air Traffic
Controllers Association, termed the incident "a roll of the dice,"
and called the fact the Piaggio did not collide with the other
aircraft "miraculous."
The Piaggio "was climbing and turning right through their flight
paths," Foote added. "That's about as ugly as it gets. The aircraft
didn't need to be where it was."
Now, there's no doubt the incident was serious... and
uncomfortably recalls the 1978 midair collision between a PSA
Boeing 727 and a Cessna 172 over San Diego, that killed 144 people.
But these accounts are particularly breathless, especially compared
with two recent separation incidents involving commercial
airliners... with not a general aviation plane in sight.
As ANN reported, in two cases less than one
week apart, landing traffic at JFK elected to go-around, putting
those planes into conflict with traffic departing on a
perpendicular runway. In both cases, airliners came within about a
half-mile laterally and between 100-300 feet vertically, depending
on whether controllers or the FAA were doing the talking.
The FAA and controllers termed those incidents serious, as well
-- and they were. Both also spurred changes to arrival procedures
at JFK. But they did not provoke use of such terms as "miraculous,"
or "a roll of the dice."
We'd really hate to think the agency and controllers union are
trumpeting this incident because it involved a corporate
aircraft...