From 2018 to 2022, just three incidents occurred in the U.S. in which commercial passenger or cargo planes “narrowly avoided” crashing into each other.
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A fifth incident occurred Feb. 22, when a Mesa Airlines flight was forced to halt a landing 1.3 miles from the runway at Hollywood Burbank Airport in California. Air traffic controllers had allowed a SkyWest flight to take off from the same runway at the same time, the FAA said.

And on Tuesday, the FAA said it was investigating Monday night’s close call in Boston between a JetBlue flight and a private plane, though the agency said it hasn’t yet determined how close the planes got to each other.

The FAA said Wednesday that it had classified January’s incidents in Santa Barbara, Baltimore and New York as representing “a significant potential for collision,” the second most serious tier in its four-class ranking of runway incursions. It has not yet assigned a category to February’s close calls in Austin, Burbank and Boston.

The agency said a seventh incident this year that attracted significant media attention, which occurred Jan. 23 in Honolulu, qualified for its third-most serious tier, saying the aircraft had “ample time and/or distance to avoid a collision.” In that episode, a United Airlines flight crossed a runway about 2,170 feet in front of a small cargo plane at Daniel K. Inouye International Airport.

The FAA ought to classify the Honolulu, JFK and Austin incidents as “serious,” said Alan Diehl, a former crash investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board, adding that the Austin incident in particular showed “what I considered to be questionable controller behavior.”

“Ted Cruz is right,” Diehl said. “We were very lucky that we’re not looking at hundreds of casualties in all three of those incidents.”

Some former air safety officials say the problems on display are probably at least partially a result of the pandemic and the way it has reshaped the aviation workforce, for which there isn’t necessarily a quick fix.

In 2020 as the pandemic forced air traffic to historic lows, the airline industry shed more than 90,000 jobs through buyouts and incentives for early retirements, reaching a low point of 364,471 full-time employees by that November, according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics.

As flights skyrocketed back toward pre-pandemic levels the industry has raced to meet the demand, hiring more than 100,000 new airline workers over the past two years alone. Now, airline staffing levels have surpassed those even before the pandemic with 473,349 full-time employees as of December 2022, the bureau reported.

“I think the American people have been burned a little bit by the failure of our transportation system and the fact that we’re really going to have to rebuild the human infrastructure in aviation,” said Jim Hall, an independent aviation consultant who chaired the NTSB from 1993 to 2001. “We lost a whole lot of qualified pilots, mechanics and flight attendants and we’ve seen how that has impacted aviation in the last 12 to 18 months. What you have going on right now is a retraining of the system.”

The FAA’s air traffic control staffing, which has been problematic for years in part because of a wave of retirements combined with how long it can take for new hires to complete their training, is a piece of the puzzle as well.

The agency has about 14,000 air traffic controllers nationwide, according to the National Air Traffic Controllers Association union, which declined to comment on the spate of near-misses. In July, NATCA leader Rich Santa told an industry conference that attrition is outpacing controller hiring, even as the demand for flights is surging.

A skills gap across the industry

This mass staff exodus across many sectors of the aviation workforce creates a gap in skill levels that can’t be filled purely through new hires, particularly in roles such as pilots and air traffic controllers that require extensive training. To take the controls of a commercial airplane, a pilot must first have had 1,500 hours of flight time. And it can take years for an air traffic controller to be considered fully qualified.

Diehl, the former crash investigator, agreed that the aviation industry is “still adjusting to a post-pandemic environment.”

“We also know that there is a pilot shortage partly because of retirements,” Diehl said. “I’m not saying it was a factor in any of those three incidents. But in general we are seeing an influx of new people and frankly a lowering of new standards.”

The FAA’s Nolen rejected the notion that workforce issues are contributing to lower standards, noting that the FAA is planning to hire new air traffic controllers and the aviation industry is hiring new pilots to cope with demand.

“The industry has done a lot as well as the agency,” Nolen said. “We are on track to hire 1,500 air traffic controllers this year and we’ll hire another 1,800 air traffic controllers next year. There’s a lot of hiring going on.”

But Hall, the former NTSB chair, said a feverish hiring pace doesn’t fix any gap in experience. He suggested that’s a particularly acute problem when it comes to the increasing push for allowing more industry “self-certification” that the FAA then simply oversees.

“If you don’t have the knowledge and expertise to operate the system, you’re looking at possible failures that cost lives,” Hall said. “Both in the cockpit and in the tower, we’re going to have to pay close attention and support the FAA to rebuild its oversight of the industry and encourage Congress to refocus their oversight on aviation.”

Cox said the incidents “do not have a common denominator” and that absent a common thread, it’s difficult to target a fix.

He suggested that the NTSB investigations ultimately will prove the best tool at addressing any future changes.

“I think right now we need to be patient to get the right answers, not the fast answer,” Cox said.