US regulators probe Delta ground accident at Atlanta airport

By David Shepardson

(Reuters) -The wing of a Delta Air Lines plane struck a regional jet while taxiing for departure at the Atlanta airport on Tuesday, damaging both planes, the airline and a federal agency said.

The accident resulted in severe damage to the tail of the much smaller regional jet.

The Federal Aviation Administration and National Transportation Safety Board both said they will investigate the incident that occurred at the intersection of two taxiways around 10:10 a.m. EDT.

The airline said the wing of a Delta Airbus A350 that was set to depart for Tokyo-Haneda struck the tail of an Endeavor Air CRJ-900 that was scheduled to depart for Lafayette, Louisiana, resulting in damage to the tail of the regional jet and the wing of the A350. Endeavor is a wholly owned Delta subsidiary.

Delta said there were no reported injuries among the 221 passengers on the A350 and 56 passengers on the CRJ-900.

A number of near-miss and runway incursion incidents last year raised concerns about U.S. aviation safety and the strain on understaffed air traffic control, prompting the NTSB to call for more technology to prevent collisions.

FAA Administrator Mike Whitaker said earlier at an industry conference on Tuesday that the agency has deployed technologies at some airports that provide an alert if an aircraft is lined up on the wrong runway or on a taxiway.

"We've started to deploy pretty simple off-the-shelf solutions for controllers to get better situational awareness," Whitaker said, adding that close calls were down by more than half in the first half of the year. "So there's progress, but we need to get better. There's no excuse for that happening."

(Reporting by David Shepardson in WashingtonEditing by Chizu Nomiyama and Matthew Lewis)