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| In January, an American Airlines plane crossed in front of a Delta Air Lines plane leaving Kennedy Airport. Eduardo Muñoz |
On Friday, the National Transportation Safety Board summoned the pilot of an American Airlines plane that crossed in front of another jet cleared to take off at Kennedy International Airport last month. I did. I took action.
An American Airlines plane crossed the runway without permission from air traffic control on January 13, according to a preliminary near-miss report by the Safety Board. This forced air traffic controllers to instruct the pilots of Delta's planes to abort takeoffs. The aircraft came within 1,400 feet of each other.
In a statement, the union representing American Airlines pilots said it opposes electronic voice recordings because they can cause pilots to lose their candor.
Union spokesman Capt. Dennis Tadger said in an interview that reassuring interviews with pilots were "important to gain as much information as possible in safety investigations." said it has begun to require that witnesses be electronically recorded.
However, the Safety Commission said in a statement that recording interviews were a "long-standing practice" and that its staff had recorded interviews in "many past investigations involving commercial airlines." The company said it informed American Airlines pilots that it would provide the records so court reporters could record their testimony and check for accuracy.
An American Airlines flight attendant said he was given seven days to respond to the subpoena.
He said he had reviewed written statements from the Delta Air Lines crew, adding that "their statements contain sufficient information for N.T.S.B."
Cockpit recordings of both planes had been "overwritten" and overwritten on tape, according to the safety commission, and no voice recordings of the pilots of both planes talking to each other remained during the incident. Devices that record conversations are designed to overwrite after 2 hours automatically.
In its statement, the Safety Board noted that in 2018 the Federal Aviation Administration recommended requiring cockpit voice recorders to be capable of recording at least 25 hours of audio.
Last week, a Southwest Airlines plane and a FedEx jet narrowly avoided a collision at Bergstrom International Airport in Austin, Texas.
