FAA Says 2 Planes Got Too Close

The Federal Aviation Administration said Wednesday that it was investigating how two commercial jets came closer than safety standards allow during Monday’s power outage at Los Angeles International Airport.

The airport’s control tower lost power for less than a second at 9:38 a.m., forcing about 70 planes approaching LAX to circle.

But some radar and communications equipment remained out for up to five hours.

About 10:10 a.m., a controller prepared one of the planes for landing, bringing it out of a circling pattern about 20 miles northeast of Twentynine Palms, FAA officials said.

The plane came within 4.2 miles of another jet in the area, violating safety standards that require planes in that airspace to stay at least five miles apart. Both were at an altitude of 28,000 feet.

On Wednesday, FAA officials downplayed the violation.

“Safety wasn’t compromised, and it wasn’t a near miss,” said FAA spokesman Donn Walker, noting that incidents only qualify as “near-midair-collisions” when planes come within 500 feet of each other.

Nationwide, 1,212 similar safety violations occurred in 2003.

Although the incident occurred during the power problems at the control tower, FAA officials believe the mistake was caused by an air traffic controller, not malfunctioning equipment. The controller misjudged the turning rate of the plane and put it into the landing line too quickly, Walker said.

Officials for the air traffic controllers union disagreed.

“It was absolutely a result of the outage,” said Doug Church, spokesman for the National Air Traffic Controllers Assn. “Because of the outage, controllers were swamped in the sector where this happened.”

Usually two controllers handle that sector, but on Monday, Church said, the area was so busy with so many planes circling that supervisors assigned a third controller to help.

The FAA is still looking into why the power failure caused so many problems. The agency has been criticized by airport officials and air traffic controllers because backup batteries didn’t work.