An Alaska Airlines aircraft nearly collided with a FedEx cargo plane during an aborted landing at Newark Liberty International Airport Tuesday evening, radar data shows.<\/p>\n
Alaska Airlines Flight 294 was ordered to perform a go-around when FedEx Flight 721 was cleared to approach an intersecting runway for landing, the FAA said in a statement.<\/p>\n
The passenger plane cleared the FedEx charter by as little as 300 feet \u2014 close to the length of the average American football field \u2014 data from FlightRadar24 indicated.<\/p>\n
Two planes nearly crashed into one another at Newark Liberty International Airport on Tuesday. Luiz C. Ribeiro for New York Post<\/p>\n
Air traffic controllers directed the Alaska flight to reroute just seconds before it was supposed to touch down, according to audio obtained by the same software.<\/p>\n
Michael McCormick, the former vice president of the FAA, told ABC 7 New York<\/a> that the near-mishap came down to two intersecting runways.<\/p>\n \u201c\u201dIt is a challenge for a tower controller to try to get that timing perfect, it doesn\u2019t always work and that\u2019s what happened in this case, so the tower controller waited and unfortunately, in my opinion, too long and they had to send the aircraft on a go-around,\u201d McCormick said.<\/p>\n The FAA and the NTSB are probing the near crash.<\/p>\n The aircrafts came within a few hundred feet of each other. Flightradar<\/p>\n The ongoing partial government shutdown has caused significant staffing shortages at a several major airports across the country \u2014 with TSA workers currently not receiving pay.<\/p>\n White House economists estimated that the shutdown has caused upwards of $2.5 billion in losses<\/a>.<\/p>\n The air traffic controller ordered a go-around moments before the Alaska Airlines flight was set to land. dima \u2013 stock.adobe.com<\/p>\n Last week, Senate Democrats\u00a0blocked a bill that would have restored funding<\/a>\u00a0to the DHS for the fourth time in the past month.<\/p>\n