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UPS cargo plane collides with passenger jet at Miami airport just one day after nationwide flight cancellations
A UPS cargo plane collided with a passenger jet at Miami International Airport, one day after a nationwide aviation ground stop caused thousands of flight delays and cancellations across the US.
The collision occurred at approximately 9:15PM, when a Copa Airlines passenger jet arriving from Panama City and a UPS cargo aircraft bound for Bogota, Colombia, collided at the intersection of two taxiways.
Shortly after the incident, the Copa Airlines pilot reported over the radio that "somebody hit us," prompting air traffic control to question the crew of UPS Flight 358.
"UPS 358, did you hit that aircraft?" the controller asked, according to air traffic control (ATC) audio.
The pilot confessed, saying, "Yeah, we went too far, and he clipped us with his wing."
Two people injured in Miami airport collision
Greg Chin, communications director for Miami International Airport, told The New York Post that "Flights are being directed to other taxiways, so there is no impact to airport operations at this time".
"Two patients were treated on the scene by Miami-Dade Fire Rescue for minor injuries and did not require medical transport," he added.
The incident came just one day after a nationwide aviation ground stop caused disruption to US air travel.
However, there was no confirmed connection between the collision and the previous day's air traffic control problems.
Nationwide FAA outage disrupted thousands of flights
As previously reported, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) suspended departing flights across the country following a communications failure affecting air traffic control systems.
According to the Wall Street Journal, more than 13,000 flights were delayed or canceled during the disruption.
The ground stop was lifted roughly four hours later, allowing departures to resume, although officials warned that the disruption could take days to resolve.
"So at 8.15 tonight, Eastern Time, we’ve opened up the airspace," Sean Duffy, the US transportation secretary, said. "But it’s going to take us some time to unwind what happened this afternoon."
Duffy blames aging technology for nationwide outage
During a White House briefing on Friday evening, Duffy blamed the outage on overloaded network equipment within the FAA's aging infrastructure.
"Our (network) switches, our routers, actually got overloaded with data," he said. "They started to give us inconsistency in the data from those routers. And because of that, we shut the system down."
He pointed to the outdated technology still supporting the country's air traffic control network.
"We use 1980s little copper lines," he said. "It's an old system that went down. And it went down everywhere; it got overloaded."
However, US Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin, who was also at the briefing, indicated the failure is linked to the FAA's recent effort to upgrade some of the older systems with newer technology.
He noted the FAA was "putting in new equipment, new technology. And that new equipment, new technology, just - it was overwhelming the older system, which is why Secretary Duffy made it very clear the patchwork doesn't work. We need one complete system".
Although the FAA lifted the nationwide ground stop on Friday evening, Duffy warned that airlines could continue experiencing delays and cancellations for several days as they worked to restore normal operations.