The Federal Aviation Administration says it is investigating whether a Southwest Airlines flight may have flown too close to an air traffic control tower at LaGuardia when it veered off course during turbulent weather last month.
The agency says the plane, Southwest Airlines Flight 147, went off course at the Queens hub around 1 p.m. Saturday, March 23, as strong storms rolled through the area. An air traffic controller told the crew to perform a go-around at LaGuardia Airport, which is when an approaching flight aborts its landing procedure and gets back in the queue.
The flight ended up diverting to Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport. It landed safely.
No injuries were reported.
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Southwest confirmed the diverted landing in a statement, saying the flight had encountered turbulence and low visibility at LaGuardia. It returned to LaGuardia after a brief layover in Baltimore.
"We are reviewing the event as part of our Safety systems," a spokesperson for the airline said.
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Aviation experts say with congested skies, along with relatively short runways and sometimes rough weather conditions, LaGuardia has a relatively solid safety record.
The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) launched an investigation into close calls at U.S. airports last fall, noting a surge in such incidents -- six close calls in 2023 alone. The FAA identified 23 of the most serious types of close calls in the last fiscal year, which ended Oct. 1, up from 16 the year before and 11 a decade ago.
Independent estimates suggest those figures grossly understate such incidents.
A particularly scary one occurred in February 2023 in Austin, Texas. During poor visibility in the early morning hours, a FedEx cargo plane preparing to land flew over the top of a Southwest Airlines jet that was taking off. The NTSB has estimated that they came within about 100 feet of colliding.
An air traffic controller had cleared both planes to use the same runway. In other recent incidents, pilots appeared to be at fault. The latter included an incident at JFK Airport in January 2023.
The pilots of an American Airlines plane taxied across the wrong runway — into the path of another jetliner that was taking off — after the captain became distracted and confused about takeoff instructions and the co-pilot lost track of their plane's location, according to documents released earlier this year as part of an ongoing investigation.
