ATLANTA -- On Friday, a wing of an American Airlines flight was hit by a bus at Hartsfield Jackson International Airport. No one was hurt but the plane's return flight to Dallas was cancelled.
"We were just on the runway taxiing and then there was a big bump," passenger Christina Theodoroff said.
A Delta flight in Minneapolis St. Paul with 245 passengers felt a similar jolt when a wing on their plane hit another. The FAA's incursion reports are filled with fender benders and close calls. A plane 120 feet from hitting a pickup truck or flying just 75 feet above the tail of another.
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.
Retired FAA spokesperson Jack Barker reviewed the reports as well and says, while concerning, passengers shouldn't be afraid.
"When you have a violation of the standards it should be reported so you can study to see if anything should be done, but they were not necessarily unsafe," Barker said.
But there are incidents that do put passengers feet from danger. In the past decade Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport ranked number three for runway incursions, behind Chicago O'Hare and LAX. They are the busiest airports, but Denver is fifth and it only had 53 incidents in the same time period Hartsfield reported 187.
FAA spokesperson Kathleen Bergen stressed that in that time, 13 million flights took off or landed in Atlanta and the number includes all levels of incursions. Only three were categorized as serious, or could have put passengers lives at risk, and happened more than ten years ago.
Cpt. Steve Jangelis with Air Line Pilots Association, or ALPA, is a co-chair on the FAA Runway Safety Council. In a phone interview he applauded the FAA for providing more lights, paint and improved technology to make runway boundaries more defined and prevent incursions.
Jangelis attributed the increase in reports to 2007 guideline changes on when incidents need to be documented, not necessarily an increase in accidents or near misses.
Stephen Reilly, USA Today Investigative Reporter, says the awareness we do now have must be taken seriously. "These planes are taking off and landing at high speeds. They're carrying an awful lot of people and awful lot of fuel, and having something in the runway when it shouldn't be has at least potential for very catastrophic event," he said.
Because the stakes are high, Barker says the system is designed to accommodate error. While those errors must and should be reported, it doesn't mean the passengers were not safe. Imagine if every driver had to report a near miss in their car.
"The most dangerous part of a flight is your drive to the airport," he said.
The FAA sent 11Alive's Rebecca Lindstom a statement, responding to the investigation:
Serious runway incursions have decreased by 77 percent since 2000. In 2013, more than 99 percent of the runway incursions involved incidents in which there was no risk of collision. The nationwide runway incursion rate is fewer than 0.395 incursions per million operations. The Federal Aviation Administration collects information about runway incidents at the nation's airports to find ways to further enhance safety in a very safe system. The FAA develops specific safety efforts for each individual airport and believes the total number of incidents is too small compared to the number of operations to provide any useful comparison of airport safety.
The FAA also has significantly improved data collection and runway incursion reporting over the past few years. In 2007, the FAA adopted International Civil Aviation Organization reporting standards, which reclassified the runway incursion count to include additional types of incidents that were not included in the previous standards. The agency implemented improved reporting systems in January of 2012 that have enabled us to capture more data than ever before. The FAA believes that the comprehensive, proactive safety management system we have put in place continues to reduce the level of risk on our nation's runways.
