A JetBlue pilot had to make a quick decision while taking off to avoid hitting a plane approaching the airport to land.
The incident happened on Jan. 22, 2022, at the Yampa Valley Regional Airport, 25 miles from Steamboat Springs, Colorado, but the National Transportation Safety Board just released its report on the investigation of what happened this week, The Associated Press reported.
The NTSB found that the captain took off at a higher incline than normal “due to his surprise about encountering head on landing traffic.”
The tail of the JetBlue plane hit the runway during takeoff, the AP reported. No one was hurt, but the flight that had been enroute to Florida diverted to Denver. The NTSB called the tail strike an accident but said that damage was “substantial.”
The “Today” show shared the video of the quick takeoff as well as the damage that the plane sustained.
The other plane, a Beechcraft King Air 350, was about five miles from the airport when the JetBlue plane started to taxi onto the runway.
“I hope you don’t hit us,” the plane’s crew told the JetBlue pilots.
The captain and co-captain on the JetBlue plane said they didn’t see the Beechcraft but swerved to the right after takeoff to avoid it after the jet’s collision-avoidance system alerted them. At the time the the two aircraft were about 2.6 miles apart, the JetBlue flight took off.
The NTSB said that “nonstandard” radio communication from the Beechcraft crew contributed to the incident, the AP reported.
The report says that the other contributing factor was that the incident happened at a small regional airport where large jets and private planes are arriving and where there were no air traffic controllers.
Doug Moss, a safety consultant and former United Airlines pilot, said, “If this had been a tower-controlled airport, this would not have happened.”
John Cox, a former airline pilot and current safety consultant, said he wondered why JetBlue pilots started moving without knowing how far the Beechcraft was from them and why the second plane didn’t move when they knew the JetBlue flight was taking off.
The Beechcraft pilots “didn’t do anything egregiously wrong up to the point that they knew they had an A320 coming face-to-face with them and they didn’t abort the landing and get out of its way,” Cox told the AP.