CHICAGO (AP) — Pilots on a Southwest Airlines flight attempting to land at Chicago’s Midway Airport were forced to climb back into the sky to avoid another aircraft crossing the runway on Tuesday morning.
Airport webcam video posted to X shows the Southwest plane approaching a runway just before 9 a.m. Tuesday before its nose abruptly pulls up. A smaller jet is seen crossing the runway that the passenger plane was set to use.
Southwest Flight 2504 safely landed “after the crew performed a precautionary go-around to avoid a possible conflict with another aircraft that entered the runway,” an airline spokesperson said in an email. “The crew followed safety procedures and the flight landed without incident.”
Audio recording of communication between the crew and the tower includes the ground tower employee breaking off mid-message to the plane.
The pilot then said “Southwest 2504 going around” and followed directions to climb back to 3,000 feet.
Seconds later, the audio captures the pilot asking the tower: “Southwest 2504, how’d that happen?”
The second plane, described as a business jet, entered the runway without authorization, according to the Federal Aviation Administration.
Flexjet, the plane’s owner, said the company is aware “of the occurrence in Chicago.”
“Flexjet adheres to the highest safety standards and we are conducting a thorough investigation,” a spokesperson said in a statement. “Any action to rectify and ensure the highest safety standards will be taken.”
Both the FAA and the National Transportation Safety Board say they are investigating the incident.
The Southwest Flight was en route to Midway Airport from Omaha, Nebraska, according to FlightAware.
John Goglia, a former National Transportation Safety Board member, said the near-crash shows “the system worked exactly as it was designed to.”
That is because the Southwest pilot was aware that the other plane wasn’t going to stop in time, he said.
In probing the incident, investigators will likely look at factors including how well-staffed the tower was and whether instructions coming out of the tower were clear, he said.
“Those things do happen,” he said, citing possible miscommunication, including a pilot mishearing instructions.
The past few weeks have seen four major aviation disasters in North America. They include the Feb. 6 crash of a commuter plane in Alaska that killed all 10 people on board and the Jan. 26 midair collision between an Army helicopter and an American Airlines flight at Washington’s Ronald Reagan National Airport that killed all 67 aboard the two aircraft.
A medical transport jet with a child patient, her mother and four others aboard crashed Jan. 31 into a Philadelphia neighborhood. That crash killed seven people, including all those aboard, and injured 19 others.
Twenty-one people were injured Feb. 17 when a Delta flight flipped and landed on its roof at Toronto’s Pearson Airport.
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Williams reported from Detroit. Associated Press writer Jennifer Sinco Kelleher in Honolulu contributed to this report.
