This Article is From Jun 23, 2011

"Cancel take off plans!" Close shave at JFK

'Cancel take off plans!' Close shave at JFK
New York: A jet carrying 286 passengers slammed on its brakes and aborted a takeoff this week at Kennedy Airport after another plane began taxiing toward the runway it was using, the Federal Aviation Administration said on Wednesday.

Lufthansa Flight 411 was cleared for takeoff and EgyptAir Flight 986 was instructed to stay behind a "hold line" 250 feet behind the runway at 6:50 pm on Monday, an FAA spokesperson said.

The EgyptAir crossed the line but did not enter the runway, the spokesperson said.

In radio recordings posted on the website LiveATC.net, a controller in the JFK tower is heard giving takeoff clearance to the Lufthansa flight while another controller directs the EgyptAir plane.

"Cancel takeoff, cancel takeoff plans!" a controller shouts to the Lufthansa jet.

The Lufthansa plane, an Airbus A340, slammed on its brakes and came to a stop.

Then it taxied off the runway.

The pilot told controllers he was worried his brakes may have overheated, so controllers sent a Port Authority crew to help check the plane's landing gear.

"That was quite a show. Thought it was going to be a short career," a pilot who witnessed the aborted takeoff remarked on the radio.

The FAA was looking at "pilot deviation" because the EgyptAir plane, a Boeing 777, didn't follow air traffic instructions.

The FAA is investigating and will determine how close the two planes came.

"The risk of collision here is very high because the distances are fairly small," said Bill Voss, President and CEO of Flight Safety Foundation.

"There is only a few hundred feet from the point where the aircraft crosses the holding line to where they are actually at risk of collision with the departing aircraft."

Mr Voss says a crash in this situation would have been "catastrophic."

EgyptAir officials said they had no knowledge of the close call.

The Lufthansa flight was heading to Munich, an airline spokesman said.

After the takeoff was halted, the captain returned to the gate for a maintenance check while the passengers remained on the plane.

The fight departed about two hours later, the spokesman said.

There were no reports of injuries.

The New York Post reported that the EgyptAir flight was bound for Cairo.

It was not immediately known how many people it was carrying.

It departed about 90 minutes afterward.

Aviation authorities are increasingly worried about the danger of runway collisions as planes get bigger and airports more congested.

In December a JetBlue plane took a wrong turn at Boston's Logan Airport and nearly taxied onto a runway where another plane was taking off.

The deadliest crash in aviation history was a runway collision. In 1977 a KLM Boeing 747 crashed into a Pan Am 747 on the same runway in Tenerife, in the Canary Islands, killing 583 people.
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