Fourteen seconds. That is all that separated a ‘normal day’ at Lisbon airport yesterday, and a disaster that could have taken hundreds of lives.
Correio de Manhã explains: A Boeing 777, loaded with passengers from Dubai, was coming into land at 11.48 am, travelling at 250 kms/ h and down to an altitude of just 350 metres. It was 14.4 seconds from touchdown when the pilot realised that an Easyjet Airbus 320 was ‘sitting on the tarmac’ (full of passengers) awaiting clearance for take-off.
How does something like this happen in an age where aviation is powered by so much in the way of technology? NAV (Portugal’s Air Traffic Control authority) has downplayed the incident, suggesting it is ‘perfectly normal’, and ‘happens all the time at airports throughout the world’.
“There was never any likelihood of a collision”, NAV’s Filipe Cardoso tells the paper.
What happened, Cardoso explained, is that “the last airplane to land had taken longer than expected to leave the strip, which delayed the take-off of the other plane (the Easyjet Airbus headed for Edinburgh, Scotland) and which led the control tower to give the indication to the pilot (of the Boeing) to abort landing and ‘circle’.
Source: Correio da Manhã
