FAA opens investigation after second recent near miss at JFK exposes safety gaps

On Tuesday afternoon, a regional jet operated by American Airlines aborted its approach to JFK Airport and subsequently flew within a few hundred meters of a similarly sized Air Canada regional jet that was on a routine landing, prompting an immediate but unsurprisingly routine notification to the Federal Aviation Administration.

The incident, which occurred just days after a comparable brush‑stroke involving two other commercial aircraft at a different major hub, has been classified by the FAA as a near miss, thereby initiating a formal investigative procedure that will scrutinise not only the flight crews’ decision‑making but also the air traffic control directives that allowed the converging trajectories to persist.

Preliminary data released by the airline indicated that the American pilot elected to execute a go‑around after encountering unexpected wind shear, a maneuver that, while standard, appears to have been poorly coordinated with the adjacent runway’s inbound traffic, consequently bringing the two aircraft into dangerously close proximity and exposing the inadequacies of existing separation protocols.

Air Canada’s flight crew, meanwhile, reported maintaining a prescribed glide path and adhering to clearance instructions, yet the subsequent collision‑avoidance alerts generated by onboard systems suggest that the margin of safety was eroded to a point where manual intervention was nearly unavoidable, thereby raising questions about the effectiveness of real‑time conflict detection mechanisms employed by both the airline and the FAA’s surveillance infrastructure.

In the broader context, the recurrence of such incidents at a premier international gateway underscores a systemic complacency that allows procedural lapses to persist despite decades of technological advancement, implying that without a decisive overhaul of coordination protocols, regulatory oversight, and airline training curricula, the probability of an actual collision remains an unsettling inevitability rather than a remote hypothetical.

Published: April 22, 2026