2 Planes Narrowly Avoid Collision at Mumbai Airport in Nail-Biting Close Call

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Air traffic controllers at busy airports oversee hundreds of arrivals and departures every day, and while serious accidents are rare, every so often a controller will make a bad call or a pilot will miss a cue, leading to trouble on the tarmac. In the past two months alone, DCA Airport in Washington, DC, has seen two separate instances of near collisions; potential disasters that were only narrowly avoided through last-second evasive actions.

But things got even scarier on a runway in Mumbai, India, this weekend when two separate aircraft came close to an airplane fender-bender. The incident at Mumbai Airport was caught in a gutwrenching video that shows just how close the two aircraft came to disaster.

This was a nailbiter! According to @cbseveningnews , the video shows an airplane landing on the Mumbai Airport runway, closely following another jet that was taking off on the very same runway! It's not often that a close call like this is caught on camera, and the footage shown here is deeply disconcerting. Those pilots must have been sweating bullets!

Related: Dangerous Near-Collision at DCA Airport Has People Worried About Air Traffic Control

What Happened in Mumbai?

According to Channel News Asia , the arriving IndiGo jet and the departing Air India fligh t came within just 509 meters (just shy of 1,670 feet) of each other laterally at their closest point. Fortunately, instead of moving along intersecting paths, the two Airbus A320neos were heading in the same direction, and as the Air India plane lifted off seconds before the IndiGo plane touched down, it appears that neither plane needed to take any other evasive maneuvers. This could have been a lot worse- but it was still too close of a call.

According to Business Insider India , both IndiGo and Air India have stated that their pilots followed instructions given to them by Mumbai Airport's ATC. In light of this, India's Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) has "de-rostered" the air traffic controller involved in the incident and is opening an inquiry to "establish whether all operational norms were observed by both the ATC and the pilots during the incident."

Business Insider India notes that Mumbai Airport currently handles over 850 flights every day, with that number expected to jump to 951 daily flights over the summer travel season. With that extreme level of traffic volume, airport officials can't afford to risk another close call like this one.

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