Another Reason To Freak Out About Air Travel
If youve been wasting your time on planes fretting about shoe bombers or deep-vein thrombosis, theres something new to focus your paranoia on. In the past month, there have been [five near-misses,] with aircraft coming close to colliding in the skies over New York. Thats compared to only three around the city in all of 2006. In case youre wondering what airlines were involved, the tally is: [two Jetblue, two Continental and one American Eagle jet](http://www.1010wins.com/pages/567949.php?contentType=4&contentId=598274). But the airlines may not be to blame: According to the Air Traffic Controllers union, [more controllers are needed to man the increasingly congested skies](http://mail.google.com/mail/?view=page&name=js&ver=1p7g0lm3i18y4). The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) denies that an air-traffic controller shortage has anything to do with it, but is investigating the recent spike.
Planes are supposed to keep a distance of three miles apart horizontally, and 1,000 feet vertically. A near-miss is defined as aircraft coming within 500 feet of each other. In one of the more terrifying incidents last month, a Continental jet came within 200 feet vertically of a helicopter. For reference, 200 feet is equivalent to about 28 Shaquille ONealls stacked atop one another, the length of four of the worlds largest snakes,or 2,012 American cockroaches, according to [weirdconverter.com]. Sen. Charles Schumer has railed against the FAA, blaming its cost-cutting measures and saying they are a mess. Pilots report the incidents when they occur, but in the two cases involving Jetblue aircraft, the airline has disputed the pilots reports. Somehow the airline of [eight-hours-on-the-tarmac](http://money.cnn.com/2007/02/15/news/companies/jetblue/index.htm) fame denying it ever happened isn't very reassuring.
Photo courtesy of [lclark0621 on Flickr]