Airliner Averts Collision During Airport Landing

In the first near midair collision to become public at John Wayne Airport this year, the pilot of a Delta Airlines Boeing 757 with 168 passengers aboard aborted a landing when he thought a Cessna landing on a parallel runway was drifting too close.

“It was almost like ‘Top Gun,’ ” said passenger Donelle Mackey, a Daytona Beach resident who was coming to visit cousins in Orange County on Delta Flight 725 from Dallas, scheduled to land at 8:15 p.m. Thursday.

Maureen Thompson, Mackey’s relative, said she watched in horror from her car as she sat in traffic trying to get into the airport. “I thought right then I was going to have to bury my cousin,” she said. “I can’t believe they didn’t crash.”

Jodie Tyson, who watched from the ground, said the Cessna appeared to be trying to land underneath the jetliner’s right wing.

“We heard a lot of passengers talking about it as they were getting off the plane,” she said.

The Delta pilot filed a report of a near midair collision after he landed on the second attempt.

The Federal Aviation Administration said it is investigating. But both the airline and federal officials described the incident as minor.

“We did not consider it to be a major incident,” said Delta spokesman Bill Berry in Atlanta. “The report from the captain said that, as a precautionary measure, he elected to go around again after his first officer saw the Cessna during the final (approach). The first officer was concerned about the Cessna’s angle of approach, which made it appear that there was going to be a conflict with Delta’s airspace.”

Berry added: “There was nothing sudden. The pilot did not consider it to be a case of taking evasive action. It was all a carefully planned execution.”

FAA spokeswoman Barbara Abels said both planes were cleared to land on parallel runways, 1-9 Left and 1-9 Right. Simultaneous landings are routine at John Wayne, with airport officials saying that there is 500 feet between the center lines of both runways, the minimum required by the FAA.

“The control tower saw both planes, was in contact with both pilots, and they were aware of each other,” Abels said. “The tower did not tell the Delta pilot to take evasive action. He made that decision (to go around) on his own, apparently because he wasn’t comfortable.”

Abels said that pilots can file incident reports at any time, even if the two planes involved stayed miles apart. Also, unsafe aircraft separation often goes unreported because neither pilot files a written statement upon landing. “It’s strictly up to the pilots,” Abels explained.

As a result, airport and FAA officials said, statistics on near midair collisions are notoriously unreliable.

From the ground, Thompson said, it appeared that the same Cessna appeared to come too close to the commercial airliner two times. She said the Cessna pilot, who has not been identified publicly, was flying toward the approaching jetliner in a head-on direction over the airfield. The jetliner had just crossed over the busy San Diego Freeway, ready to set down, she said. Then the same Cessna circled back sharply, flying parallel to the jetliner. It was then, Thompson said, that the Delta pilot aborted his landing.

The pilot’s report only mentioned the aborted landing, and included nothing about a head-on encounter. An FAA official said the encounter was probably an optical illusion, since neither pilot nor the FAA control tower reported it.

Last July, federal officials reported that air corridors around John Wayne Airport--the nations’s fifth busiest airport--ranked seventh in the nation with 20 near midair collisions involving commercial airliners from 1986 through 1988, more than any other air corridor in the West except the airspace around Los Angeles and San Francisco international airports.

In the first incident of 1989 for the John Wayne tower, almost exactly a year ago, a private pilot failed to follow an air-traffic controller’s tape-recorded instructions and turned directly in front of a departing Continental Airlines jet over Newport Beach, missing it by just 100 feet.