The pre-dawn fog was so dense when two jets nearly collided on an Austin airport runway that the air traffic controller could see only the lights of one aircraft, and a pilot could only make out the “silhouette of the left wing” on the other.
These details are from first-hand accounts of the February incident, one of the most serious in a series of near-collisions at US runways this year, and includes pilots and air traffic controllers’ interviews with investigators. The National Transportation Safety Board on Wednesday released more than 2,000 pages of interviews, transcripts, air traffic control recordings, and flight track data it has collected on the February 4 incident.
The crew of the landing FedEx aircraft, a 767 cargo jet with three crew members onboard, told investigators the plane was on autopilot for the approach into Austin-Bergstrom International Airport. They were aware of a Southwest Airlines 737 jet, with 128 passengers and crew, that was cleared to depart from the same runway, and had confirmed with air traffic controllers their clearance to land.
FedEx co-pilot Robert J. Bradeen, Jr. said that “probably 100 to 150 feet” above the point where the plane would land, he was alternating his view from outside and inside the airplane.
He said during “one of [the] glance-outs there was a white light that did not match the runway lighting.”
Bradeen said the light “quickly morphed into a silhouette of the left wing with the airplane, just above the glare shield from my point of view.”
The FedEx crew called for the Southwest crew to abort the takeoff. Concurrently, the FedEx crew aborted their landing.
The air traffic controller who had cleared both flights told investigators in a separate interview that he could see nothing on the ground through the fog — a type of fog he’d experienced “maybe a handful of times.”
“We didn’t have any ground visibility,” said controller Damian Campbell, who has worked at Austin for four years. “I mean, you couldn’t see anything. You couldn’t see the approach end of the runway, we couldn’t see our turnoff points.”
Campbell had only seen a landing light of the approaching FedEx plane through the fog and never actually saw the Southwest plane as it taxied.
Campbell described a confidence that Southwest pilots would take off promptly after being cleared onto the runway. He said the airline is the “only carrier that I would do any squeeze play with.”
Because he could not see the Southwest plane, he described realizing it may not have departed yet because he — in the tower — could not “hear the engines of the 737.”
About 21 seconds before the urgent FedEx abort instruction, he radioed the Southwest pilots to ask if they were departing.
“Rollin now,” the Southwest crew replied, according to a transcript of the radio exchanges published by the NTSB.
Campbell told investigators he did not know why he did not call off the FedEx plane’s landing clearance, but suggested he was concerned if he called them off too late, the two planes could collide in the air.
“So if he’s coming down, and we give him a go-around that’s short and Southwest is actually rotating, we make a worse situation even worse,” he said.
He said in hindsight he could have stopped the Southwest flight from taking off as well. “It looked to be a safe operation. But hindsight being 20/20, definitely could have held them,” he said noting the poor visibility would have been a reason to stop it and put more separation between the arriving and departing planes.
Campbell also told investigators that he was working an overtime shift. Because of staffing issues at the tower, he said, controllers were scheduled for six-day workweeks.