Passenger Jets Were 200 Vertical Feet Apart.
The FAA is investigating a Nov. 23rd incident where two passenger jets nearly collided in the airspace over Colorado.
The two planes merged on Air Traffic Control radar at the same altitude and in the same moment.
“They were within a blink of an eye of colliding,” and “It was the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen in all my years.”
The incident is classified as an “operational error” …a mistake made by an air traffic controller.
Several planes were en route to Denver on an arrival path from the northeast, called “Sayge Six.”
Sayge is described …as a “highway in the sky” with traffic only allowed to travel in one direction, toward DIA, at 19,000 feet and 250 knots for jets.
The Sayge marker is about 47 miles northeast of DIA, and is an air traffic control handoff point between Longmont Center and DIA Approach Control.
Alarms sounded in at least one of the cockpits telling the pilots to take evasive action.
One plane dove while the other was ordered to pull up, and the two missed by about 200 vertical feet…. The source could not confirm the horizontal separation of the two planes because the radar images briefly merged into a single image
