A serious aviation incident was narrowly avoided Tuesday evening at Newark Liberty International Airport when an Alaska Airlines passenger jet came dangerously close to a FedEx cargo aircraft during a last-second aborted landing, according to radar tracking data.
Officials said Alaska Airlines Flight 294 was instructed to pull up and circle rather than land after FedEx Flight 721 had already been cleared to descend onto a runway that intersects with the one the passenger plane was approaching. The Federal Aviation Administration confirmed the sequence of events.
Flight tracking information indicated that the two aircraft passed within roughly 300 feet of each other—about the length of a football field—highlighting how close the situation came to becoming a catastrophe.
Audio recordings from air traffic control captured the tense moments, revealing that controllers redirected the Alaska Airlines jet just moments before it was scheduled to touch down.
Michael McCormick, a former FAA deputy administrator, explained that the complexity of intersecting runways can create difficult timing challenges for controllers.
“”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,” McCormick said.
Both the FAA and the National Transportation Safety Board have launched investigations into the near collision to determine exactly what went wrong.
The incident comes as airports across the country continue to grapple with staffing shortages tied to the ongoing partial government shutdown, with Transportation Security Administration workers still reporting to duty without pay.
Economic analysts at the White House have estimated that the shutdown has already resulted in losses exceeding $2.5 billion.
Efforts to resolve the funding impasse have stalled in Washington. Senate Democrats last week blocked legislation that would have restored funding to the Department of Homeland Security for the fourth time in recent weeks.
Airline industry leaders have voiced growing frustration. Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian sharply criticized lawmakers over the situation, calling their failure to reach a resolution “inexcusable.”
“We’re outraged,” Bastian seethed.
As of Thursday, the partial government shutdown had stretched into its 33rd day, with no immediate resolution in sight.
