

Before Wednesday’s crash, there had been several close calls involving U.S. commercial airlines, a 2023 New York Times investigation found.
Such near catastrophes were happening, on average, multiple times a week, according to the investigation, which found an alarming pattern of safety lapses and near misses in the skies and on the runways.
The episodes often occurred at or near airports and often were the result of human error, internal Federal Aviation Administration records showed.
Mistakes by air traffic controllers — stretched thin by a nationwide staffing shortage — have been one major factor. Some air traffic controllers have long voiced fears that a deadly crash was inevitable as the country’s aviation safety net came under mounting stress.
In addition to FAA records, the Times analyzed a database maintained by NASA that contains confidential safety reports filed by pilots, air traffic controllers and others in aviation. The analysis identified a similar phenomenon: In the most recent 12-month period for which data was available, there were about 300 accounts of near collisions involving commercial airlines.
The number of such near misses in the NASA database — which is based on voluntary submissions that are not independently corroborated — had more than doubled over the past decade, though it is unclear whether that reflected worsening safety conditions or simply increased reporting.
Aviation authorities say that the U.S. air travel system, which transports nearly 3 million passengers a day, is the safest in the world. But current and former air traffic controllers said in interviews that close calls were happening so frequently that they feared it was only a matter of time until a deadly crash occurred.
The U.S. aviation network has long been protected by an extensive system of overlapping technological and human safeguards. Pilots undergo rigorous training. So do the air traffic controllers who scour the skies and manage takeoffs and landings. The technology alerts pilots and controllers to possible dangers and directs them to steer planes away from peril.
The safety regimen, with its built-in redundancies, is known in aviation circles as the Swiss cheese model: If a problem slips through a hole in one layer, it will be caught by another.
Until Wednesday night, there had not been a U.S. domestic commercial airline crash with numerous fatalities since February 2009, when a Colgan Air flight crashed into a house near Buffalo, New York, killing all 49 people on board and a person on the ground.
The nearly 16-year streak, the longest in the history of U.S. aviation, masks what pilots, air traffic controllers, and others say are growing holes in the layers of the safety system. The result, they said, was an increasing risk of disaster.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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