Recent close calls between passenger jets have raised alarm—but are airline near-misses actually increasing?
On Tuesday, the FAA said it was investigating a report of two passenger jetliners coming within alarmingly close proximity of each other at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport. An American Airlines regional jet and an Air Canada regional jet responded to collision warnings and averted each other before landing safely.
The fact that two jetliners came within closer-than-normal proximity isn’t generally cause for alarm, although it does sometimes happen during the course of regular airline operations. But this week, it wasn’t an isolated incident.
The FAA is also investigating a similar close call between two Southwest Airlines jets at Nashville International Airport on Saturday evening. In that situation, the two jets came within 500 feet of each other before the pilots responded to onboard collision alerts and altered course to avoid a crash. One jet, which was landing, aborted the landing and went around, landing safely on the second attempt. The other jet, which was departing, proceeded to its destination without further incident.
The pair of incidents comes just shy of a month after a deadly accident at New York’s LaGuardia Airport in which the pilots of an Air Canada regional jet were killed when their aircraft collided with an airport fire truck that had been directed onto the runway while the aircraft was landing. 74 other passengers and crew were onboard the aircraft, 39 of whom were injured during the impact or evacuation of the aircraft. The two emergency responders in the airport fire truck were also injured during the collision. U.S. and Canadian transport investigators are working to determine the cause of that accident.
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The Air Canada crash came just over a year after a deadly collision between an American Eagle regional jet and a US Army helicopter over the Potomac River near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, resulting in 67 dead.
The industry has been sounding the alarm about outdated air traffic control technology for years. Airlines For America (A4A) a trade association representing U.S. air carriers, has long advocated for updates to the nation’s air traffic control system, which in many situations is still operating on decades-old technology.
The increasing number of close calls between airlines has been known for some time. The New York Times first reported on the frequency of close calls (also known in the industry as a “near miss”) in 2023. That report counted some 46 close calls involving commercial airliners—more than one per day.
At the time, the country’s accident record had stretched for several years; by the time of the Potomac River collision, the United States had gone 16 years without a large-scale, multiple-fatality accident involving a major airline. But now, with two fatal accidents in a space of 14 months, it’s a record that seems not only to have ended, but is continuing to fray.
One particularly glaring example is that the majority of US airports have not installed lighting systems that would help prevent collisions on runways, in spite of the technology having been available for decades. Even during the 2023 investigation, air traffic control facilities were found to be chronically understaffed, and staffing levels were an early inclusion in the investigation into the 2025 Potomac River collision.
The FAA issued a safety call to action in 2023 to address concerns over close calls in the US air traffic system, and also published data indicating the annual runway incursion rate has remained relatively steady since 2014. The number of incursions dropped slightly in 2024 and 2025 after the FAA issued the safety call to action, and the year-to-date number of incursions for 2026 is trending slightly lower at press time.
The majority of incidents the FAA tracked were rated as “An incident that meets the definition of a runway incursion but with no immediate safety consequences,” and the bulk of the remainder were rated as “An incident characterized by ample time and/or distance to avoid a collision.” Less than one percent of the overall incursions since 2014 were rated as an incident where a collision would have been likely or was narrowly avoided.