The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) announced late on Tuesday that it had opened an investigation into yet another aviation close call after an American Airlines jet was given clearance to land at the same time that an Air Canada Rouge plane was given the green light to take off from the same runway.
The alarming incident occurred on February 16 at Sarasota Bradenton International Airport in Florida, although initial details about the near miss are only now coming to light after the NTSB confirmed it was probing the accident.
In a statement, the NTSB said the pilots of the American Airlines-operated Boeing 737 self-initiated a go-around when they realized they might conflict with the Airbus A321 operated by Air Canada Rouge.
The federal agency charged with investigating aviation accidents and near misses said there were no injuries and no damage was incurred. Sparse few details were released about the incident, and the NTSB says it will take around two to three weeks before any more information is made public.
Investigators did not immediately confirm how close the two aircraft came to hitting one another.
The incident will likely attract intense scrutiny after a series of recent high-profile near misses marring the industry in recent weeks.
Several days after this latest reported incident, a runway incursion occurred at the Bob Hope Airport in Los Angeles when a Skywest Embraer 175 was taking off from the same runway that a Mesa Airlines CRJ9 was attempting to land on.
Again, in that near miss, the pilots of the Mesa CRL9 self-initiated a go-around after seeing the other plane on the runway, and no injuries were reported.
And in another incident, a United Airlines-operated Boeing 777, which had just landed in Honolulu, accidentally crossed into the path of a small Cessna that was landing on a parallel runway.
An initial ancient report suggests that the much larger 777 partially edged onto the parallel runway because it was too big to hold in an area of the taxiway assigned by air traffic controllers.
NTSB investigators are also busy probing a near miss between a FedEx Express freighter plane and Southwest Airlines operated Boeing 737 at Austin Airport after the pilots of the Southwest plane were given clearance to takeoff as the FedEx Boeing 767 was landing on the same runway.
In that incident, the Southwest plane took off as the pilots of the FedEx plane were performing a go-around to avoid a collision. The two planes veered off in opposite directions but came within 1,000 feet on one another.
One word: YIKES!!!!!