CNN –
The pilots of an American Airlines flight were distracted by paperwork when they mistakenly taxied into the path of a departing Delta plane, triggering alarms in the control tower at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport and an urgent appeal to revoke takeoff clearance “triggered” by the air traffic controller.
“My hands are shaking, I'm in shock, I'm thinking – what the hell, what just happened,” the air traffic controller responsible for preventing a catastrophic collision told investigators after the incident.
The compelling new details of the close call on the night of Jan. 13, 2023 are contained in National Transportation Safety Board documents released Monday.
The case was the first in a series of serious near-misses between commercial and non-commercial flights on or near the runways of major U.S. airports. In 2023, the NTSB began investigating more than seven such cases, officially called runway incursions. According to the NTSB, the two planes came within 1,400 feet of collision in the JFK incident.
In the cockpit of the American Airlines Boeing 777 carrying 149 passengers en route to London, the crew reported being inundated with weather reports and paperwork, according to just-released NTSB documents. There was a third pilot in the cockpit to help, which is why the captain decided not to park the aircraft during the last-minute work.
The veteran captain – with more than 20,000 hours of flying experience – told investigators that air traffic controllers changed their instructions and ordered the plane to depart from a different runway. But while piloting, he began “thinking about my original instructions” and accidentally rolled the plane to the left on JFK's Runway 4.
He insisted to investigators that he turned on additional lighting around the plane before entering the runway, which he usually did after dark, according to a transcript of his interview.
The crew of the Delta Air Lines Boeing 737, preparing to take off with 159 people on board, didn't even see the larger American plane cruise past in front of them. But the captain told investigators that he had heard urgent instructions from air traffic controllers to abort the takeoff.
“Due to the extreme darkness of the evening, it was not until we slowed that I saw the American Airlines 777 cross the runway in front of us,” the Delta captain wrote in a statement.
As the American captain parked the plane on the other side of the runway and spoke to air traffic controllers, he had no idea how close he had come to disaster.
“I still thought I was right, that someone else screwed it up somehow,” the captain told NTSB investigators in a transcribed interview. “Looking back from where we were sitting, it didn’t look like we were close to anyone. So I didn’t know anyone was taking off from that runway.”
The NTSB interviewed four air traffic controllers in the tower cabin the night of the incident. As automated collision warning alarms sounded in the tower, the tower supervisor radioed the air traffic controller to tell the Delta flight to “cancel takeoff clearance,” an air traffic controller told investigators.
“We had a really good team up there that night,” said the controller credited with the fateful aborted transfer, “a really good team.”
The crew of the American Airlines flight told investigators in separate interviews that lights warning them about crossing the runway were turned on only after they stepped onto the runway. CNN reported shortly after the incident that airport officials went to check the lights immediately after the incident and found them to be working.
When the lights turned red, “we realized something was wrong,” the American plane's first officer said in an interview.
The first officer told investigators that while he was taxiing, the captain was busy dealing with an unusually large number of weather-related messages from company dispatchers, as well as a new procedure that required giving passengers a notice before takeoff to make an announcement.
“It was very unusual,” she said of the large volume of weather reports. “I had never seen that before.”