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The Federal Aviation Administration launched an investigation after a Frontier Airlines plane nearly collided with two trucks on an LAX taxiway.
No one was injured during the close call, but the pilot appeared shaken and worried while describing it to air traffic controllers.
“We just had two trucks cut us off,” the pilot said in ATC audio. “We had to slam on the brakes to not hit them.”
The plane was traveling at low speeds, likely giving the pilots enough time to avoid the collision.
“It happened so fast,” the pilot said in ATC audio. “I have to go check on the flight attendants in the back. It was real close, closest I’ve ever seen.”
Frontier Airlines said there were 217 passengers and seven crew members on the flight. It praised the pilots for their quick thinking. LAX has not released information about who was driving the trucks.
Brian Sinclair, a former F-18 pilot who is now an instructor at the U.S. Naval Academy, said air traffic controllers likely did not see the incident because it happened in a blind spot.
“In this case, there are three specific locations at LAX that ground people in the tower cannot see the taxiways,” Sinclair said. “You could see that that would be a risk.”
LAX has significant ground traffic with separate lanes for cars and planes.
“But, there are times when those lanes intersect, and the rules of the road still apply,” said Kris Van Cleave, senior transportation correspondent at CBS News. “You got to yield for the bigger vehicle.”
Van Cleave stressed that there were considerable differences between the LAX incident and last month’s collision at New York’s LaGuardia Airport in which two pilots died.
In the LAX close call, the plane was traveling roughly 15 mph compared to the significantly higher takeoff speeds.
“It is not a circumstance like we saw in LaGuardia, where you had vehicles that were responding to an emergency, that were crossing an active runway, that were under direct air traffic control,” Van Cleave said.
Experts said this is a situation where improvement can likely be made.
“In my 20 years of naval aviation, a lot of lessons learned were written in blood, i.e., we had fatalities,” Sinclair said. “Here is a perfect example of a get-out-of-jail-free lesson learned. Nobody was hurt. No equipment was damaged, and still there’s a lesson to be had here.”
