How One Mans Quick Thinking Saved 381 Lives | Logan Airport Incursion

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This is the story of the logan airport runway incursion on the 9th of june 2005, an aer lingus a330 was to fly from boston to shannon in ireland. At the same time A us air 737 was also on the ground at boston and it was bound for philadelphia. The airport at boston is massive. The airport has 6 runways. That day runways 4R and 4L were being used for landing land and runways 15R and 9 were used for departures. Handling all of the traffic is a massive task and so the complex task of controlling everything is split up. In simple terms you had two mini ATCs at the airport: the Boston local east controller was responsible for runways 4R and 9 and the Boston local west controller was responsible for runways 15R and 4L.

On that day the west controller was responsible for aer lingus flight 132 and the east controller was responsible for Us air flight 1170. As the time for departure grew near the aer lingus a330 made its way to runway 15R. At the same time the US air 737 was making its way to runway 9 on the other side of the airport.

At 7:39 pm and 10 seconds the controller gave the all clear for the A330 to takeoff, the pilots of the aer lingus jet started rolling and jst 5 seconds later the east controller cleared the 737 to take off from runway 09. Both jets started picking up speed down the runway. The first officer in the 737 called V1 and then noticed the a330 who was starting to rotate. Something had gone terribly wrong as both jets hurtled towards the intersection. The first officer analysed the situation in them little time that he had. What could be done to avoid a collision? Do they try and takeoff early? Do they try to keep the plane on the ground? Do they hit the brakes? Do they turn the plane into the grass? So many choices yet so little time.

He said to his captain to keep it down, as he pushed the yoke forward. To stop the plane from lifting off. As both planes merged in the intersection the Aer lingus A330 flew above the 737 barely missing it. Once they had passed the intersection the 737 lifted off with no issues the crew of the 737 got on the frequency and told departure control that they had a near miss. A transmission came in from the a330 saying we concur.

The report says that both planes were very close and that is corroborated by an animation that was put out by the NTSB at their nearest point they were just a few hundred feet apart. At the speeds that those planes were traveling at those distances would have been covered in the blink of an eye. The V1 speed for a 737 is about 145 knots. I know that it depends on a lot of factors but lets take 145 as a figure that is representative of the speeds that are encountered during takeoff. At 145 knots you’re covering 244 feet every second. The A330 was even faster as it had already taken off. Had the first officer not had the presence of mind to keep the 737 down then this could have been bad. How bad you ask? Well the 737 had 109 people on board and the a330 had 272 people on board for a total of 381 people. Yeah it could have been bad.

But how could this happen? There are procedures in place to prevent exactly something like this. As we talked about before operations at Boston was split between two controllers: the east controller and the west controller. The west controller was responsible for the A330 and the east controller was responsible for the 737. Now since the runways intersect the controllers need to