Southwest flight narrowly avoids collision with helicopter at Hollywood Burbank ... trends now
A plane almost collided with a helicopter at a Southern California airport Saturday, just days after the Federal Aviation Administration held a summit on rising safety concerns.
FAA officials said a Southwest flight was approaching a runway at the Hollywood Burbank Airport Saturday around 9.50am when an air traffic controller noticed a Los Angeles Fire Department helicopter on the same runway.
According to an FAA statement, the helicopter had been practicing touch-and-go landings. After noticing the issue, the controller told the plane to wrap around.
No one was injured and the matter is under investigation by the FAA at this time.
A similar situation unfolded at the Burbank airport in February after a Mesa Airlines flight was told to abort its landing as a SkyWest plane was given the go-ahead for take off on the same runway. That was the fourth incident of its kind in 2023.
A plane almost collided with a helicopter at a Southern California airport Saturday, just days after the Federal Aviation Administration held a summit on rising safety concerns
FAA officials said a Southwest flight was approaching a runway at the Hollywood Burbank Airport Saturday around 9.50am
As the plane was about a mile out, an air traffic controller noticed a Los Angeles Fire Department helicopter on the same runway
" class="c8" scrolling="no"
According to NBC 4 Los Angeles, the Southwest flight, a Boeing 737, was just a mile out from the runway.
The air traffic controller who noticed the serious safety issue told the helicopter to stay on the runway and the Southwest pilot to 'go around' and not to land.
During the similar incident last month at the same Southern California airport, an automatic alarm inside the Mesa Airlines plane went off as the planes worked to avoid a near collision.
The February scare was reportedly one of the major contributing factors that led the FAA to hold an impromptu safety summit to address growing concerns.
Just weeks before the Burbank near-miss, two Alaska Airlines planes scraped their tails on the tarmac of Seattle-Tacoma International Airport as they took off.
That near-miss was attributed to a software bug that left the pilots thinking their aircrafts were 20,000 pounds lighter.
The issue was deemed serious enough for Alaska Airlines to initiate a nationwide stoppage of all aircraft in the immediate aftermath, according to the Seattle Times.
At the time, a spokesperson for Alaska Airlines confirmed to DailyMail.com that the incident did occur and the grounding lasted for around 20 minutes.
'The tail touches were caused by a vendor software update that mistakenly installed code resulting in inaccurate take-off performance weight data for a small subset of our flights,' they said.
Just weeks before that, a separate flight in John F. Kennedy International Airport almost saw a similar wreck, as a Delta plane nearly drove nose-first into the side of an American Airlines jet that crossed onto its runway.
The Boeing 737 was already travelling at 115mph when an air traffic controller noticed the impending disaster.
The pilot of the Southwest Airlines flight was told to 'go around' to avoid a collision
The air traffic controller at Hollywood Burbank Airport told the helicopter to stay put
