Latest news with #ChicagoMidwayAirport
Yahoo
13-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
NearMissTracker Launches: Intelligent Near Miss Detection
Never Done Before Aviation Technology Empowers Professionals with Vital Data on Close Encounters and Crashes WASHINGTON, March 13, 2025--(BUSINESS WIRE)--In the wake of the recent Washington, D.C. crash and a potential collision resulting in a go-around maneuver at Chicago Midway Airport, NearMissTracker is proud to announce the immediate launch of its website: This platform is designed to revolutionize aviation safety by providing insights and analysis of near-miss incidents worldwide. Addressing Aviation Safety with Cutting-Edge Technology NearMissTracker utilizes advanced geospatial algorithms and artificial intelligence to analyze near-miss incidents comprehensively, detailing critical data such as the location, airline, airport, time, date, tail number and the distance in feet between aircraft during each incident. This precision supports the aviation community by providing actionable, data-driven insights that significantly enhance safety measures. "The platform delivers real-world safety analytics to help prevent accidents and ensure safer skies," said Valerie Jennings, a spokesperson for NearMissTracker. "With access to near-miss data, aviation professionals can proactively address potential threats." Empowering the Aviation Industry with Data-Driven Solutions As a vital resource for operators, investigators and safety agencies, including the NTSB and FAA, NearMissTracker's robust database allows users to search for specific incidents, aiding in the investigation and prevention of future accidents. This capability aligns with the U.S. Department of Transportation and Secretary Sean Duffy's recent call for a new world-class air traffic control system. According to a Fox News interview, the Secretary said he needs help from the brightest minds in America and high-tech American engineers or companies to back our country. By providing precise, real-world data, NearMissTracker is an essential part of the ecosystem, particularly as the industry moves towards integrating more unmanned aerial vehicles into increasingly crowded skies. Recent Incidents Highlight the Need for Timely Innovations "The urgency of our platform's launch aligns with the recent serious incidents, highlighting the critical need for innovative, technology-driven safety enhancements," added Valerie Jennings. About NearMissTracker NearMissTracker leverages advanced geospatial algorithms and artificial intelligence to analyze near-miss incidents from the real world, providing crucial data such as airline, airport, time, date, tail number, exact distance between aircraft and more. Dedicated to pioneering aviation safety, the platform delivers actionable insights, supporting the aviation community globally in proactively managing airspace safety. For more information, visit View source version on Contacts NearMissTrackerpr@ (954) 335-3838 Sign in to access your portfolio
CNN
01-03-2025
- CNN
Is flying still safe? Here's what experts say
This week's close call at Chicago Midway Airport between a Southwest aircraft and a private jet is the latest in a string of incidents that have many air travelers on edge. In the US alone, it follows the deadly midair collision over the Potomac River near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, a Medevac jet crash in Philadelphia and a regional airline crash off the coast of Nome, Alaska, that killed 10 people. Recent close calls in February include a Delta flight that made an emergency landing in Atlanta with a haze-filled cabin, and Delta flight 4819 which crash landed, rolled over and ended up resting upside down at Toronto Pearson International Airport in an incident that miraculously claimed no lives. Those events in North America come on the heels of deadly Jeju Air and Azerbaijan Airlines crashes in December 2024 and about a year after an alarming Boeing door panel blowout in the US and a separate fiery runway collision in Japan. And in 2023, a string of near-collisions at US airports spurred the creation of a new independent safety review team. Understandably, anxiety around flying has spiked. So should passengers be concerned? 'I don't know that passengers should be worried, but I think it's important for the flying public to be vocal and demand that the government and the different entities do everything possible to make air travel as safe as possible,' said Anthony Brickhouse, a US-based aviation safety expert. But even accounting for serious accidents, 'statistically speaking, you're safer in your flight than you were driving in your car to the airport,' said Brickhouse, who has decades of experience in aerospace engineering, aviation safety and accident investigation. 'Air travel remains the safest mode of transportation,' he said. Letting investigators do their jobs to find out what went wrong and advise on what needs to be done differently is an essential step after a plane crash, Brickhouse said, speaking to CNN after the DC crash, noting that the US investigative body — the National Transportation Safety Board — does not have regulatory authority. The safety recommendations that stem from NTSB investigations must be accepted and implemented by other agencies such as the Federal Aviation Administration, and they're not always adopted or can take years to implement. 'So that gap definitely needs to be closed,' Brickhouse said. While it's too soon to know precisely what factors contributed to the DC tragedy, Brickhouse said he has seen a troubling trend. 'When I first got the news, I'll tell you, I was obviously saddened, but I wasn't shocked,' he said, pointing to the string of near-collisions at US airports over the past few years. 'And in safety, we identify trends… something that happens over and over again. And in the safety world, if you keep having near-misses, eventually you're going to have a midair (collision),' he said. The series of close calls at US airports in early 2023 prompted the Federal Aviation Administration to create an independent safety review team. Its November 2023 final report cited inconsistent funding, outdated technology, short-staffed air traffic control towers and onerous training requirements among the issues 'rendering the current level of safety unsustainable.' The agency announced some immediate action related to hiring and training new air traffic controllers. A longstanding shortage of controllers continues to put strain on US airspace. At the time of the January collision at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, one air traffic controller was working two different tower positions and was handling both local and helicopter traffic, an air traffic control source told CNN. The source described the set-up as not uncommon. However, the New York Times reported that an internal preliminary FAA report says staffing was 'not normal for the time of day and volume of traffic.' Despite ongoing challenges, the safety statistics are reassuring. The DC crash 'was an awful aberration but it was an aberration,' said Guy Gratton, associate professor of aviation and the environment at Cranfield University and a commercial pilot in the UK and US. In its 2024 safety report, released in February 2025, IATA, the trade association of the world's airlines, calculated that last year saw one accident for every 880,000 flights — or seven fatal accidents out of 40.6 million flights in 2024. There were 244 onboard fatalities, compared to 72 the previous year. IATA's previous safety report had labeled 2023 'an exceptionally safe year.' Last year saw 1.13 accidents per million flights according to IATA — up from 2023's 1.09. But the five-year average from 2020-2024 has improved on the statistics from a decade ago. From 2011-2015 the five-year average was one accident for every 456,000 flights. Now it's one for every 810,000. Research sourced by Bloomberg, meanwhile, suggests that 2024 was the deadliest year for aviation since 2018. More than 500 people were killed in 2018 in plane crashes, including the Lion Air accident, the first of two crashes caused by problems with the Boeing Max aircraft. IATA said in its 2023 safety report that the industry has improved its overall safety performance by 61% over the last 10 years. A study co-authored by Arnold Barnett, a professor of statistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, highlights aviation safety's substantial improvement over many years. The main takeaway is that in the period between 2018 and 2022, the worldwide death risk per boarding was one in 13.7 million. To put that in context, there's a much higher chance of being killed in a shark attack, or give birth to quadruplets, than to die in a plane crash. That was a significant improvement on the 2008 to 2017 period, where the risk was one in 7.9 million, and a dramatic drop compared to the 1968 to 1977 period, where the risk was one death every 350,000 boardings. The past half-century has seen major progress, Barnett said. 'We're now only about 1/38th as likely to die in a plane accident compared to the levels of the late 1960s and 1970s.' Speaking to CNN after the DC crash, Brickhouse was hopeful that the tragedy would bring weaknesses in the current aviation system to light. 'And hopefully putting the spotlight and the attention on those weaknesses will give us a good chance to improve in any areas that we need to improve in.' Gratton agreed. 'Obviously the systems broke down,' he said of the DC crash, adding that recommendations for the prevention of future accidents will 'roll out immediately across the USA and probably some will roll out fairly quickly afterwards across the world.' 'The simple fact that that happens is why aviation is so safe,' he said. He contrasted aviation's global response to plane crashes with how other kinds of accidents are viewed in the aftermath. 'If there was a road accident outside your home and 20 people killed, would there be a proper report in a year, with recommendations rolled out across the country? No, because it's nowhere near as robust as the air transportation system, investigating problems, and publishing and using recommendations when anything went wrong. That, fundamentally, is why aviation is so safe.' It's not all reassuring. Both Gratton and Geoffrey Thomas, editor of aviation website 42,000 Feet and previously the founder of AirlineRatings, the first website to rank airlines by safety, agree that seeing three recent fatal commercial accidents in the space of a month — those of Jeju Air, Azerbaijan Airlines and American Airlines — are symbolic of a changing aviation landscape, with more congested skies and expanding war zones. Gratton also says that there's a question of 'normalization of deviance' in the DC crash — the idea that people and institutions can essentially start to cut corners instead of playing by the book. 'The obvious equivalent is that up until 1912 it was normal to steam at full power through the iceberg fields in the North Atlantic,' he said. After the Titanic sank, this practice stopped. 'But it's 2025 not 1912 — what we should be doing is looking ahead, looking at the near-misses, at statistical probabilities and using that to design what we do,' he said. 'When you fail to do that, and continue to carry on with an unsafe practice, we call that normalization of deviance. I think there's a reasonable case to be made that that happened [in the DC crash].' He doesn't think a helicopter would have been allowed to be transiting at a low level underneath an aircraft on approach to land at London's Heathrow Airport, for example. The helicopter corridor that was in use at the time of the DC crash has subsequently been shut down indefinitely by the FAA, an agency official told CNN. Thomas, meanwhile, has choice words for US politicians when it comes to the flurry of incidents in North America. 'My view is that the US Congress has consistently starved the FAA of the funding it needs, so the American oversight and air traffic control system is not as good as it could be,' he said, speaking shortly after the DC crash. 'You often see almost a yearly occurrence where they're fighting over [funding].' As recently as July 2024, aviation groups urged congress to cover FAA funding shortfalls. 'There's a blame game now, but the reality is that both Republicans and Democrats have starved the FAA of the funds they need to have the world's best air traffic control system,' said Thomas. 'It's a great system — this is the first crash since 2009 and the worst since 2001 – but is it the best? No.' Yet they both reiterate that flying is still the safest form of transport. 'People tend to think about the flight that's taking them to their destination as the only flight, but the reality is that there are over 100,000 commercial flights per day around the world so it's extraordinarily safe,' said Thomas. 'Flying is incredibly safe,' said Gratton. 'And all the processes put in place over a lot of years to make it as safe as possible are still there.' For those still concerned about flying, you're not alone. Aerophobia — fear of flying — affects more than 25 million adults in the United States, according to the Cleveland Clinic. It's a more severe form of flight anxiety — to be classed as aerophobia, your fear must have interfered with your life for six months or more. If you're worried about an upcoming flight, canceling it often feels like the simplest solution, but that short-term relief is harmful long-term, Dr. Gail Saltz, clinical associate professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City, told CNN. 'Your world just shrunk a little smaller and your fear, being reinforced by this, gets larger,' she said, adding that drinking or taking medication to help with the flight anxiety should also be avoided. Exposure therapy — in other words, taking the flight — is the road to recovery, she said, advising undertaking therapy with a skilled professional. But taking that flight doesn't mean boarding the plane in blind panic. Saltz says that meditation, progressive muscle relaxation and 10 minutes of paced deep breathing can help calm you onboard. Watching or listening to something, or talking to a travel companion can also help, she said. Many nervous flyers' fear stems from a lack of knowledge about how things work, and several European airlines aim to address that by running fear of flying courses. Arguably the best known is the day-long Flying with Confidence course run by British Airways, which includes sessions with BA pilots and cabin crew, backed up by a clinical psychologist. The day ends with a real flight operated by the crew who ran the course. Many other nervous flyers swear by alternative techniques such as hypnotherapy or EFT (tapping). But be reassured: Saltz says that phobias, including aerophobia, are 'very treatable.' It's just a matter of finding out what works for you. CNN's Pete Muntean, Alexandra Skores, Kristen Rogers, Jacopo Prisco, Rebekah Riess and Lex Harvey contributed to this report.
Yahoo
01-03-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Trump's cuts are harming airplane passengers' safety. We need more investment.
The recent airplane crash at Toronto's Pearson Airport underlined once again the top priority of flight attendants: the safety of their passengers. Their quick actions undoubtedly prevented serious injuries, and perhaps fatalities. Further, this issue continues to get closer to home, as the near collision incident this week at Chicago Midway Airport shows, involving an aircraft originating from Knoxville. Flight attendants provide care and comfort to the three million passengers who travel daily in the United States. But above all, as the Pearson incident and other recent airplane emergencies show, we are safety professionals trained to treat medical crises, neutralize onboard threats, and evacuate during emergencies. We are the last line of defense for passenger safety in the skies. What is not appreciated, because it is not readily visible, is the system that supports flight attendants. To maintain a high standard of safety and security in the air, flight crews require the support and expertise of ground staff in control towers, aviation analysts in government offices, and, yes, elected officials in Congress who proactively address critical safety challenges through legislation and oversight. Unfortunately, the Trump Administration is recklessly putting flight crews and the flying public in jeopardy. During an already historic air traffic controller shortage, the administration: paused hiring and training of incoming controllers through a federal hiring freeze, without clear guidance on specific exemptions. terminated air traffic control support staff, gutted the Aviation Security Advisory Committee, forced out the head of the Transportation Security Administration, and most recently fired 400 Federal Aviation Administration personnel tasked with ensuring safety through radar, landing and navigational aid maintenance. Opinion: DOGE is exposing absurdities and Americans support it. Ignore the media hype. These dangerous and unacceptable steps will put lives at risk, including the 33 million passengers that flew through the four big cities in Tennessee in 2024, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation. Air travel is still the safest form of transportation, but that reality is not inevitable. On behalf of my one million colleagues in the U.S. airline industry, and the many millions of Americans who travel regularly, Congress needs to provide a check and balance on the White House and maintain safety in the skies. Alex Roberts, a Knoxville, Tennessee native, is a second-generation aviation worker and a government affairs representative for a major airline union, representing nearly 30,000 flight attendants across the country. Find him on BlueSky at This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Airplane passengers deserve for Trump to invest in safety | Opinion
CBS News
26-02-2025
- General
- CBS News
Retired Minnesota pilot assures flying is still safe despite recent incidents
A retired Minnesota commercial pilot assures travelers it is still safe to fly despite recent incidents involving planes. On Tuesday, a Southwest passenger plane came in for a landing at Chicago Midway Airport and was just seconds away from hitting a business jet that pulled into its path. "When you're dealing with humans, human error can occur," Gary Berg said. Berg lives in Minnesota and used to fly planes. He now trains those aiming to. He says Tuesday's scenario is rare and exactly what pilots train for. "What happened today is what should've happened. Somebody missed a clearance crossing the runway and they told Southwest to go around and he did," Berg said. The incident prompted America's new Transportation Secretary to say he'll pull pilots' licenses if they don't follow instructions from the tower. "Look both ways before you cross a street — or a runway," Berg said. At a runway nearby, the Federal Aviation Administration says Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport had its own close call in 2023. This was one of 22 similar events nationwide that year. But in 2024, that nationwide number dropped nearly 68% to seven, with none happening at Minnesota's largest airport. "The system worked today. The controller watched it, they just told Southwest to go around," Berg said. "Flying is safe. People are human and they make mistakes." But tensions are high — especially after this flight from MSP crash landed in Toronto, where all 80 people on board survived. "I was already very anxious going on the plane," a passenger on the Southwest flight said. In a statement about the incident, Southwest Airlines said, "The crew followed safety procedures, and the flight landed without incident. The crew's quick thinking and professionalism exemplify our unwavering focus on safety, and Southwest is grateful for their swift and decisive actions." The business jet was a FlexJet Bombardier Challenger bound for Knoxville, Tennessee. "We are aware of the occurrence today in Chicago. Flexjet adheres to the highest safety standards and we are conducting a thorough investigation," a Flexjet spokesperson told CBS News. "Any action to rectify and ensure the highest safety standards will be taken."
