An American Airlines flight bound for Boston was forced to abort takeoff at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport on Wednesday morning to avoid another plane that was landing.

The Federal Aviation Administration said it’s investigating what happened. It’s the second such incident at the Washington, DC, airport in the last six weeks.

“An air traffic controller cancelled the takeoff clearance for American Airlines Flight 2134 because another aircraft was cleared to land on an intersecting runway,” the FAA said in a statement about Wednesday’s scare.

  • iAmTheTot@kbin.social
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    5 months ago

    While it’s bad that it got this close, it’s good that someone stopped that plane. I’m not saying this is evidence that the system is flawless, but this is better than at least one alternative

    • hemko@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      5 months ago

      I think this tells that the system is working, since even with shit going south they were able to save the day by aborting lift off.

      It tells that the system/process can work through issues, which is even more critical than flawless function

      • Dabundis@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        Yeah, it really looks like a case of “the first layer of administrative safety control failed, and another layer kicked in to prevent a dangerous scenario.”

      • Soup@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        Yea but it’s not like we don’t have the technology and skill to be able to keep the plane from moving at all. This story should be “airports so busy that there are constant conflicts with schedules” not “these planes nearly obliterated each other.”

        It’s a good thing that we have fail-safes but this was too close. Aviation standards need to be airtight.

    • ryathal@sh.itjust.works
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      5 months ago

      The same thing that’s been happening for a while, just delayed for a bit from covid. Airports are at peak capacity in a lot of places and building more isn’t happening fast enough. Air traffic controllers are overworked and understaffed, this makes mistakes more common. Especially when trying to have 20% more planes pass through an airport than it was really designed for.

      • Thrashy@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        And like so many things in modern life, you can lay at least part of the blame on Reagan. He broke the air traffic controllers’ union in order to force them to accept longer hours, lower pay, and brutal shift schedules – look up “The Rattler” sometime, and then realize that the person directing traffic at airport that thousands of people are arriving and departing from every hour probably hasn’t slept for more than a couple hours in the last three days.

        • Soup@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          Fuck, at least Hitler’s war caused much of the world to industrialize. If I got to go back and kill any one person it would be Reagan, I think. By the numbers I’m positive Reagan’s policies have allowed more people to die and they’ve definitely turned “living” into “surviving” for people so…yea fuck that guy. What a horrible person.

          Ronald Reagan: Worse than Hitler.

          • Thrashy@lemmy.world
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            5 months ago

            I don’t think it would make much of a difference. Absent Reagan, the Republican nominee would have been Bush Sr., and he likely would have won in the general – Carter was wildly unpopular due to persistent stagflation, the Iranian oil crisis, and the related hostage crisis. The GOP could have nominated an expired jar of mayonnaise and still won the election, and then done most of the same things anyway – Reagan was infamously more a charismatic figurehead than a technocrat, and visibly going senile in his second term. The conservative cabal moving the levers behind the scene would have been largely the same.

            As ever, the Great Man theory of history tends to be more hagiography than fact, and it’s most informative to look at larger socio-cultural trends.

    • Hildegarde@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      News is reporting more now because boeing has been in the news.

      Trains didn’t start spontaneously derailing after east palestine, it’s just the news started reporting on stories they would have previosly ignored. Same is happening with aviation.

      • stepintomydojo@sh.itjust.works
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        5 months ago

        Trains must have stopped derailing, all we hear about now is planes. /s

        (Proving the point about the news and its tendency to focus on the currently popular issue)

      • tal@lemmy.today
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        5 months ago

        That’s a thought. Media tends to do “cycles”.

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summer_of_the_Shark

        The Summer of the Shark refers to the coverage of shark attacks by American news media in the summer of 2001. The sensationalist coverage of shark attacks began in early July following the Fourth of July weekend shark attack on 8-year-old Jessie Arbogast, and continued almost unabated—despite no evidence for an actual increase in attacks—until the September 11 terrorist attacks shifted the media’s attention away from beaches. The Summer of the Shark has since been remembered as an example of tabloid television perpetuating a story with no real merit beyond its ability to draw ratings.