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3 commuter jets come within seconds of collision in DC

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  • Description

    A look at the confusion in control tower

  • Duration 2:29
  • Date

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-- Fox News alert and confusion in the control tower causes a near disaster.

Three jets coming within seconds of a midair collision near our nation's capital.

Steve Centanni is live at Reagan national airport in Arlington Virginia where this all happened earlier this week.

Steve.

He John it was question of miscommunication.

And it could've been very dangerous but of course.

There was no problem here nobody was injured all the planes got their destinations.

Safely what was happening was there was -- direction of traffic from south to north.

Normally you see behind me over here and because -- thunderstorms in the area the FAA -- local controllers are trying to reverse the direction to go from.

-- -- -- -- -- landings and -- well one of the planes at least didn't get the word and that's the one that was coming in for a landing in the north.

When he shouldn't have been so at the last minute controllers diverted him to the west away from the airport we have a graphic that shows what happened.

We had the one plane landing from the north.

Who really shouldn't have been there and two planes on the opposite end of the runway the same runway.

Trying to take off heading from south and north.

And now the first one that had taken off.

Was heading more or less the same direction is one coming south.

And landing but they had turned away from each other so the FA now says there was 800 feet of vertical separation.

Too close for comfort.

But not as close a survey reported and they were heading in opposite directions.

-- the FAA put out a statement.

And they said that during the switching of operations miscommunication.

Led to the over the loss of required separation between two regional jets the FAA is investigating the incident and we'll take appropriate action to address.

The miscommunication.

Now US Airways it was not very verbal in their response they put -- very short students who were currently investigating and working with the FAA.

To determine what occurred.

The safety of our customers and employees is always our top priority this of course the same airport where they have had trouble with their traffic -- before -- remember just last year.

One of them was asleep on the overnight shift when -- plane was trying to come in for a landing and get directions.

And couldn't contact that air traffic controller but in this case there were no injuries and all the things -- ride to their destinations safely.

That's the good news but not happy ending to a scary story -- -- -- thank you.

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