Two words almost cause plane crash at Paris airport

A “slip of the tongue” by an air traffic controller brought two planes within metres of a potentially fatal crash at one of Europe’s busiest airports.

Two words by an air traffic controller almost brought two international flights within 90m of crashing at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris, a new report has revealed.

The controller’s “slip of the tongue” happened as a United Airlines plane prepared to land from New Jersey just as an easyJet plane readied for takeoff for Malaga, Spain on July 20, 2020.

The report into the near-disaster was released this week by France’s Organisation of Safety Investigations (BEA).

At the time, planes were taking off from runway 09R and landing on runway 09L. However, instead telling United’s Boeing 787 to land on 09L, the air traffic controller told its crew to land on “9 right”.

The controller then told the departing easyJet plane to take off from the same runway, 09R.

Crew on the United Airlines Boeing 787 were told to land on the wrong runway. File image. Picture: Robyn Beck/AFP

The BEA said the United crew sought to confirm the change of runway by saying “understand” and “sidestep for 9 right”, but the controller didn’t check the readback.

The United crew lined up for landing and started the manoeuvre. In the meantime, the easyJet crew on 09R asked why the United plane was starting to land and warned of a potential collision between the two planes.

When the landing United plane was at an altitude of 300 feet (91m), just 1300m from the end of the runway, the easyJet crew and the controller alerted the United pilots who aborted their landing.

The planes missed each other by just 91m, the report said.

The air traffic controller may have been rusty from months of low air traffic during the pandemic, the report found. File image.

Compounding the issue was the fact the controller didn’t have a direct line of sight of the 09 runways because the screens facing those runways had been broken and she was working at a different screen, the report noted.

The controller also told investigators she was confused by a different plane’s earlier request to land on runway 09R due to technical difficulties.

She said she “thought her tongue had slipped because she was focused on runway 09 right with an Air France Boeing 787 that had just landed there”, the report said.

The report found the controller was out of practice due to reduced levels of air traffic during the Covid-19 pandemic. Investigators also said the United Airlines crew should have used the term “confirm” in response to the controller’s direction instead of “understand”, which is not a standard term.