The first two months of 2023 have seen an uptick in near-collisions involving commercial planes in the U.S. — a sign of potential trouble for an American aviation system that hasn’t had a fatal airliner crash in nearly a decade.

In fact, during January and February, commercial jets experienced close calls with other aircraft at a faster pace than they had during all of the previous five years combined, according to a POLITICO review of Federal Aviation Administration data.

From 2018 to 2022, the data show, 23 incidents occurred in the U.S. in which commercial passenger or cargo planes came close to colliding, including four in which the FAA said the aircraft “narrowly avoided” a crash. (The FAA’s data also includes incidents solely involving helicopters or general aviation aircraft, which POLITICO excluded from its analysis.)

But this year has already seen six near-miss incidents involving airliners, including a heart-stopping moment when a FedEx cargo plane came within 100 feet of landing on top of a Southwest Airlines jet that was taking off in Austin, Texas. The most recent incident, Monday night, involved a JetBlue flight and a private plane at Boston Logan International Airport.

The FAA is still reviewing whether the Austin and Boston incidents and a third in Burbank, Calif., fall into the most serious, “narrowly avoided” category of near-miss.

The agency said Wednesday that this year’s other three near-misses represented “a significant potential for collision,” a slightly less dire second tier. By comparison, five second-tier incidents involving commercial planes occurred during all of 2022.

Together, those incidents raise questions about the health of an industry whose operations have gone through tremendous upheaval, with Covid-19 sending travel plummeting only to see it surge again last year, according to former safety officials and accident investigators. Concern is already evident on Capitol Hill, where lawmakers are crafting a major overhaul of aviation policy due later this year.

It also comes at a time when President Joe Biden’s pick to lead the FAA has been stalled due to Republican objections about his relatively sparse aviation background. The nominee, Denver International Airport CEO Phil Washington, finally received a Senate hearing Wednesday.

“In recent weeks we’ve seen several very concerning near-misses that were almost mass fatality crashes,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said at a congressional hearing Feb. 15. He asked Billy Nolen, the acting FAA administrator, “What more can be done to make sure the next near-miss doesn’t become a horrific tragedy?”

In response, Nolen insisted that the national aviation system, including its trained pilots, air traffic controllers and safety standards, is working as designed and that the flying public is safe.

Addressing questions about the Austin incident, Nolen said: “It is not what we would expect to have happened, but when we think about how we train both our controllers and our pilots, the system works as it is designed to avert what you say could have been a horrific outcome.”

But Nolen has also called a summit that will meet this month to review potentially budding safety threats, asking industry and union representatives to review the FAA’s programs and suggest changes. In announcing the summit, Nolen wrote that the agency will also probe internal data and seek to understand why certain safety protocols “appear to be not as effective as they once were.”

“I think it’s a good time to stop and say: ‘Is there anything we’re missing and is there anything we can do differently’ to maintain this high level of safety that we’ve enjoyed,” said Nolen, who is also the FAA’s safety chief.

Senate Commerce Chair Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) did not seem mollified, telling reporters after the February hearing that the spike of near-disasters shows “the system needs to be improved.” She said she is concerned that the FAA doesn’t have the right technology or personnel in place.

Besides the near-misses, the summit also comes on the heels of a holiday travel meltdown in which Southwest Airlines canceled about 16,000 flights as it struggled to recover from a winter storm, and the FAA’s own snafu involving a computer system glitch that forced flights to be grounded nationwide for hours.

A record of safety in jeopardy

A handful of people have died on board commercial airlines over the past decade, including a 2018 episode in which a Southwest Airlines passenger was partially sucked out a shattered window in the skies near Philadelphia. But no fatal commercial airliner crash has happened in the U.S. since July 2013, when a Boeing 777 flown by South Korea’s Asiana Airlines struck a seawall and broke apart while landing at San Francisco International Airport, killing three people.

The last fatal crash involving a U.S. airline was in 2009, when a small regional jet operated by Colgan Air on behalf of now-defunct Continental Airlines went down in icy conditions, killing all 49 people on board and one on the ground.

Each of this year’s incidents is undergoing a separate investigation by both the FAA and the National Transportation Safety Board, an independent agency. But the NTSB investigations will likely take over a year to complete. Meanwhile, the uptick of near misses is a warning sign that something may be amiss in the way airlines and the agency that oversees them are functioning, lawmakers, former pilots and former crash investigators said.

This year’s near-misses include one Jan. 9 in which air traffic controllers cleared a Boeing 737 to land on a runway in Santa Barbara, Calif., where a vehicle was performing an inspection. Three days later, a vehicle crossing a runway without air traffic control approval at Baltimore-Washington International Airport came within 173 feet of a Boeing 737 that was taking off, the FAA said.

Those two incidents were not previously reported.

On Jan. 13, a Delta Air Lines flight taking off from John F. Kennedy International Airport had to stop to avoid hitting another plane that had crossed 1,000 feet in front of it.

Then came the Feb. 4 near-collision between a FedEx plane and a Southwest jet at Austin Bergstrom International Airport.

In the Austin incident, the FedEx plane was landing during bad weather when its pilot saw the Southwest plane underneath it, said John Cox, a former pilot and former executive air safety chair with the Air Line Pilots Association union. According to the FAA, both planes had been cleared to use the same runway.

Ted Cruz asked Billy Nolen, the acting FAA administrator, “What more can be done to make sure the next near-miss doesn’t become a horrific tragedy?”