Airports might seem like organized chaos at times, but believe it or not there’s a careful choreography going on to bring aircraft in to land and send others into the skies safely. Sometimes, it doesn’t all go to plan and this week disaster struck when two Delta aircraft collided on the tarmac at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport.
A Delta Airbus A350 bound for Tokyo collided with the tail of an Endeavor Air CRJ-900 heading to Louisiana on Tuesday morning, reports ABC News. The collision between the Airbus’ wing tip and the Endeavor’s rear end ripped off the tail of the regional jet and impacted travel plans for almost 300 passengers:
The incident unfolded at the intersection of two taxiways around 10:10 a.m., the FAA said. No one was injured on either plane, according to Delta and the airport.
“There is minimal impact to airport operations,” an airport spokesperson said in a statement.
“Passengers from one of the aircraft are being bussed from the incident to the concourses,” the spokesperson said. “The second aircraft taxied under its own power to a concourse where passengers will deplane at their gate.”
In a statement, Delta confirmed that all 221 passengers on the Tokyo-bound flight and the 56 customers heading to Lafayette, Louisiana, were being offered alternative flights to complete their journeys. The airline also confirmed that it was cooperating with the National Transportation Safety Board and other authorities that have since launched an investigation into the incident.
The Airbus involved in the collision is just seven years old while the plane it hit was a little older having been in service since 2014. Both aircraft have been transferred to a maintenance hanger for evaluation from Delta’s tech team.
While it’s shocking to see a collision such as this on the tarmac of an international airport, planes are actually coming alarmingly close to one another all the time while they’re airborne. In fact, a New York Times investigation last year found that there can be as many as 46 close-calls between commercial airliners every month in U.S. airspace.