Near runway collisions involving commercial airplanes climbed two-thirds from 2003 to 2013 at U.S. airports to a rate of nearly one per day, as a shift to major hubs led to increased traffic in most of those cities, according to a USA TODAY review of federal data.
The most severe incidents, like a 2011 close call at Chicago Midway International Airport where a departing jet narrowly missed a taxiing Boeing 737 by 62 feet, are down and officials say that shows progress.
There were 341 reported runway incidents – known in the aviation industry as "runway incursions" – involving at least one foreign or domestic commercial flight last year. In six of those incidents, a plane encountered a severe risk of a crash. In the rest, the incidents were less serious but deemed by federal officials to present a collision hazard.
The three airports with the most runway incursions since 2003 are also the nation's busiest: Chicago's O'Hare International, Los Angeles International Airport and Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International. The growth in reported runway incidents nationwide occurred even as the overall number of flights remained relatively flat.
Though there have not been any fatal crashes involving domestic airlines since 2009, officials and experts say the possibility of an accident on the ground remains a concern.
"Runway incursions are always at the top of the list" when it comes to aviation safety issues, said Mark Rosenker, former chairman of the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board.
A number of recent events have raised alarms about potential dangers on the nation's runways, taxiways and other tarmac areas. Among them:
On Oct. 5, a Delta jet with 44 passengers was clipped by a Royal Jordanian Airlines Airbus A330 carrying 159 passengers at JFK Airport in New York.
In May 2013, a United Express flight and a Scandinavian Airlines Airbus A330 struck each other on a taxiway at Newark Liberty International Airport.
In April 2011, an Air France A380 jet taxiing to the runway at JFK Airport hit the tail of a regional jet, spinning the smaller aircraft 90 degrees.
Federal Aviation Administration spokeswoman Laura Brown said improvements to the reporting system in 2007 and 2012 help explain the increase in reported runway incursions, and the number of serious incidents "remains very low."
"We believe that the comprehensive, proactive safety management system we have put in place is reducing the level of risk on our nation's runways," she said.
Often, runway incursions are minor errors that result in no real risk to passengers, but sometimes the incursions place passengers a few feet from catastrophe.
One such incident occurred on a snowy night this January, when a traffic jam of airplanes on the tarmac at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport left a passenger jet unable to taxi off an active runway.
The pilot watched helplessly as another aircraft used the runway to take off, missing a collision by 80-100 feet.
"This was way (too) close and EXTREMELY lucky," the unnamed pilot wrote in a report filed anonymously with federal officials. "Had that been a heavier aircraft … the probability of a collision would have been imminent.
"Less than a year after the close call in Minneapolis, 245 passengers at the same airport were jolted by last month's wing-clipping incident. No injuries were reported, but flights bound for Los Angeles and Louisville were delayed for hours.
"We were just on the runway, taxiing, and then all of the sudden, there was a big bump that we all felt," said passenger Christina Theodoroff, who was traveling to visit family in Los Angeles. "They wouldn't tell us right away what happened, but everyone around me knew."
Advances in safety technology have rendered midair collisions virtually non-existent in domestic commercial passenger flights. The last involving two commercial airliners occurred in 1965, when a midair accident above Carmel, N.Y., killed four passengers and left 108 survivors.
Although passengers may feel safe once an airplane's wheels are on the tarmac, experts say ground travel at airports leaves less room for error.
"Simply because you're on the ground, you're not dealing in three dimensions, necessarily," Rosenker said. "You can go around, but you can't get below it. … The runway is the only place you can go."
The deadliest accident in aviation history was a runway incursion in 1977 at Los Rodeos Airport in the Canary Islands that killed 583 people when one Boeing 747 crashed into another during takeoff.
Doug Church, spokesman for the National Air Traffic Controllers Association – the union of workers responsible for preventing these kinds of incursions – said the number of runway incidents considered to pose a severe threat fell 84% from 2000 to 2013.
As a result of advances in technology and information gathering, Church said, "our nation's runways and taxiways have never been safer."
Yet the rash of recent incidents has resulted in increased federal scrutiny of the FAA's Runway Safety Group, which is charged with safeguarding the nation's takeoff and landing areas.
In a report released in September, the U.S. Department of Transportation's inspector general found "confusion and fragmented responsibility among runway safety personnel" at the FAA. Ineffective communication led to uncertainty about which branch of the agency leads the nation's runway safety efforts.
The Runway Safety Group has seen a 27% reduction in its non-salary budget and five changes in leadership since 2011, while runway incidents involving commercial and private flights increased 30% from 2011 to 2013.
The group has fallen behind on an effort first proposed in 2007 to install safety lighting on the runways of 23 airports nationwide, the report found. The FAA scaled back the project to 17 airports and does not expect to complete it until 2017.
Rep. Rick Larsen, D-Wash., ranking member of the House Aviation subcommittee, said he asked for the inspector general's report in response to the rise in recent runway incidents.
"We need to understand why this is happening," Larsen said in a statement, "so the FAA can make changes to improve both the safety and efficiency of our aviation system."
The September report criticized the FAA for failing to establish baseline measures that would indicate whether the increasing incident count reflects an increase in actual runway incursions or changes in the reporting rules that broadened the definition of runway incursions.Some of the growing incident count could be related to reporting changes, said Richard Healing, a Washington-area aviation consultant and former member of the National Transportation Safety Board. But the increase over the past few years probably points to an actual growth in incidents, he said.
John Hansman, professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT, said the probability of close calls between aircraft on the ground and in the air grows exponentially with increases in traffic at airports. As airports become more crowded, they leave planes fewer places to go.
"These are rare events," he said. "But the more flights you have, the more likely you're going to have these rare events."
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