Near Miss Reported at LAX in August
An arriving Asiana Airlines jumbo jet narrowly missed a departing Southwest Airlines flight at Los Angeles International Airport last month after a controller mix-up that apparently placed both planes on the same runway, federal authorities confirmed Tuesday.
A captain aboard the Asiana Boeing 747-400, which was arriving from Inchon, South Korea, aborted the landing Aug. 19 and came within several hundred feet of a Southwest jet headed to Albuquerque, according to a report obtained by The Times.
The incident eerily resembles a 1991 accident on the same runway, in which 33 people died after a controller cleared a USAir jet to land on a runway where a commuter plane was waiting to take off.
That crash occurred at night, whereas last month's incident was at 2:55 p.m. in clear weather.
Confirmation came the same day the Federal Aviation Administration held a news conference in Washington to announce that near misses on the nation's runways are declining. At the event, officials said there had been no serious incidents involving commercial jets this year. An agency spokeswoman later explained that the LAX incident was still under investigation and had not been officially added to the statistics.
Nationally, the FAA reported a 20% drop in all runway safety incidents in federal fiscal years 2000 through 2003, and serious near misses declined by more than 50%. Serious incidents involving two jets declined even more markedly, from 15 in 2000 to two in 2003.
In the Asiana incident, initial reports from the control tower at LAX estimated that the jet flew within 200 feet of the Southwest aircraft, but just how close the planes ever were to each other is still under investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board.
"It's still too damned close," said a high-ranking FAA official who requested anonymity.
The incident is the closest call at the world's fifth-busiest airport in at least four years. The facility led the nation in near misses from 2000 to 2003, according to the FAA report released Tuesday.
At LAX, controllers orchestrate a complex choreography involving nearly 2,000 landings and takeoffs a day. The airport has two sets of parallel runways, one on the north side and the other on the south side.
The NTSB has obtained the black box recorders from the Southwest plane and has interviewed the captain and first officer. Investigators have requested a statement from the Asiana captain.
