Terrifying audio captures near miss of two passenger flights | US | News
Two passenger jets trying to land at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York on Monday afternoon came close to colliding in mid-air and passed within 100 meters of each other.
Audio recordings of conversations between pilots and air traffic control obtained from ATC.com confirmed the radar data. The controller instructed the Republic pilots, “You are flying on the approach route of runway 31 on the left. Correct immediately.”
A separate controller ordered “Jazz 554 climb and maintain 10,000 feet,” instructing the plane to change course. “Traffic on your left is moving out of parallel.”
Flight tracking service FlightRadar24 revealed that a plane operated by American Airlines and a plane operated by Air Canada came alarmingly close to each other as they approached the runway.
According to the Federal Aviation Administration, Republic Airways Flight 4464 “took a spin” shortly after 2:30 p.m., directly intercepting Jazz Aviation Flight 554 as both planes attempted to land.
Data from FlightRadar24 showed the Republic plane descending at nearly 600 feet in seconds as it passed over Long Beach. At the same time, the tracking service noted that the Jazz jet climbed to about 300 meters.
The FAA praised both flight crews for reacting promptly and taking appropriate precautions, successfully preventing a catastrophic crash. Republic Airways, which operated the flight on behalf of American Airlines, confirmed that the pilots received a “resolution advisory,” an avoidance-of-collision warning issued by the aircraft’s Traffic Collision Avoidance System.
Both planes landed safely around 15:00. The FAA launched an investigation into the incident.
This follows an incident in Nashville, Tennessee, on Saturday, where two Southwest Airlines planes were forced to take evasive action to avoid a collision after an air traffic controller instructed a pilot to turn into the path of the other plane.
Last year, an American Airlines jet collided with an Army Black Hawk helicopter near Washington, D.C., killing all 67 people on both planes. That crash on Jan. 29, 2025, brought renewed attention to mid-air collisions, which remain uncommon in commercial aviation, where planes are equipped with systems designed to warn pilots of potential collisions.
The majority of close calls that occur each year involve smaller aircraft that do not have such systems, but the Federal Aviation Administration was not immediately able to provide figures on how many occur each year. A few crashes occur each year, often involving small aircraft, such as the February 2025 incident in Arizona that killed two people.
