WASHINGTON — In a time of unparalleled aviation safety in the United States, reports of mistakes by air-traffic controllers have nearly doubled — a seeming contradiction that puzzles safety experts.
The near collision last month of an American Airlines jet with 259 people aboard and two Air Force transport planes southeast of New York City, coupled with the rise in known errors, has raised concerns in Congress that safety may be eroding.
A US Airways plane carrying 95 people crossed paths with a cargo plane in September, coming within 50 to 100 feet of each other while taking off from Minneapolis. A few months earlier a US Airways Airbus 319 intersected the path of another cargo plane during an aborted landing in Anchorage, Alaska.
In the 12 months ending Sept. 30, 2010, there were 1,889 operation errors — which usually means aircraft coming too close together, according to the Federal Aviation Administration. That was up from 947 such errors the year before and 1,008 the year before that.
The last major crash involved a regional airliner on Feb. 12, 2009, near Buffalo, N.Y., that killed 50 people.
The FAA administrator said the higher number of known errors is due to better reporting and technology that can determine more precisely how close planes are in the air.
Few of the errors fall into the most serious category, which could result in pilots taking evasive action to prevent an accident. But those instances have also increased. In the year ending Sept. 30, there were 44 such events, compared with 37 in 2009 and 28 in 2008.
The rise in incidents coincides with a period of rapid turnover in the controller workforce. The FAA has hired 7,000 controllers in the past five years and plans to hire 5,200 in the next five.
