Flying Toward Disaster? Near-Collision Shows Hazard in Skies Around O’Hare

By Joseph Ryan Daily Herald Staff Writer

On a cloud-filled, rainy fall evening, a Learjet inexplicably passes its turn for landing at Palwaukee Municipal Airport and speeds toward a LOT Polish Airlines 767 set to land at O’Hare with possibly more than 200 passengers.

The two planes are now on a collision course – victims of a system with little forgiveness for tiny jets maneuvering near the paths of giant airliners north of O’Hare.

Radar screens at the air traffic control facility in Elgin turn red and alarms wail. Radar operators scramble as the Learjet rapidly approaches Polish Airlines Flight 3.

“Where is he going? Holy crap,” exclaims an air traffic controller, as others try to get the Learjet pilot on the radio.

“What is that guy doing?” the same controller then says as another cuts in, “Why is he going so south? He is going to fall out of the sky.”

Precious seconds tick away as the Learjet speeds near the wide- body Boeing 767. At about 170 mph, the two are heading for the same runway at O’Hare.

The Learjet is soon just less than a mile off the right wing of the 767 – only 6 seconds away from a midair collision over Mount Prospect that would surely kill hundreds.

“Hey Palwaukee, what is that guy doing?!” another controller calls out.

A calm Palwaukee tower controller finally cuts in, “I got him coming back north now.”

The Learjet banks hard right so fast that controllers fear its landing gears might get damaged, but the crisis is averted and the alarms cease.

This stomach-churning near-accident occurred Sept. 19 at about 7:20 p.m., according to FAA records and tapes obtained by the Daily Herald and ABC 7 Chicago.

Both the Palwaukee tower air traffic controller and the Learjet pilot were found at fault in the near-collision by an FAA investigation. The controller should have kept better track of the plane, according to FAA records. The Learjet pilot was lost and thought he was actually north of Palwaukee, records show.

Yet, this particular near-accident may show something more than human error. To Joseph Bellino, union chief for O’Hare tower controllers, it underscores a significant and systemic safety problem in the increasingly congested skies around O’Hare.

“This isn’t just something out of the blue,” says the 40-year veteran.

Bellino says the FAA needs to mandate occasional gaps in the long lines of planes landing at or departing from O’Hare to create a safety buffer in case of deadly mistakes by Palwaukee fliers or controllers to the north.

“In the event that this happened, there would have been a hole in the sky where that Polish Airlines (jet) was,” Bellino says. “They would have never gotten close to one another.”

FAA officials, however, say such gaps aren’t warranted.

They also argue the safety procedure wouldn’t have helped in this case, because the Learjet was supposedly operating on regulations for landing by sight, not instrument guidance. The gaps would apply only to instrument-guided landings, said FAA spokesman Elizabeth Isham Cory in a statement.

“This is a very rare event,” she said.

No firm statistics were available on exactly how rare, but it is clear that the number of errors by controllers is rising and the skies above O’Hare will only become more crowded in the coming years.

Mistakes by air traffic controllers directing planes around O’Hare nearly doubled to 41 in 2006 and a federal safety probe into near-accidents on runways at the nation’s second busiest landing strip continues.

The rise in errors is described by the FAA as a fluke, and by controllers as the result of tough new standards. But both sides also expect new, more sophisticated ground radar to help when it comes online in the summer.

In the next decade, O’Hare expects to serve about 1.6 million landings and takeoffs after the completion of a $7.5 billion expansion. That will be an increase over the 958,643 operations at O’Hare last year.

Palwaukee, too, with a recently refinished main runway, aims to increase traffic. It is the state’s third-busiest airport, servicing 112,875 takeoffs and landings last year. The airport was recently renamed Chicago Executive Airport in the hopes of drawing more Learjet business fliers.

Palwaukee officials would welcome the gaps in air traffic Bellino calls for, but they say the measure is not at the top of their agenda.

“It will obviously help out our own safety enhancements,” said Palwaukee spokesman James Lang.

Bellino insists that the FAA has instituted the gaps in flight arrivals and departures at least five or six times during his 40 years at O’Hare tower. He says each came after a near-midair collision, and the new rules were consistently tossed aside by the FAA after about a month of complaints over flight delays.

FAA officials deny that gaps were ever put in place for Palwaukee traffic.

Regardless, Bellino says he will continue to campaign for the change because the delays are irrelevant when it comes to the possibility of a catastrophic midair collision over the suburbs.

“Safety trumps everything, in our opinion,” he says.

jryan@@dailyherald.com

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