WASHINGTON — A White House plane carrying Michelle Obama came too close to a 200-ton military cargo jet and had to abort its landing at Joint Base Andrews on Monday after an air-traffic controller’s mistake, according to federal officials familiar with the incident.
The first lady was returning with Jill Biden from New York aboard a Boeing 737 that is part of the presidential fleet.
The controllers in the tower at Andrews recognized that the massive C-17 and the Obama flight were far too close when the controller at the Potomac Terminal Radar Approach Control (TRACON) facility in Warrenton, Va., handed off responsibility for the two aircraft.
Because an airplane’s wake causes severe turbulence, the Federal Aviation Administration has strict standards on how much distance controllers should maintain between planes. A fully loaded C-17 can create such turbulence that the FAA requires a 5-mile separation behind it.
When the handoff occurred, the planes were 3.08 miles apart, radar shows, but the TRACON controller told the Andrews tower that they were 4 miles apart. Before handing off, the TRACON controller warned Obama’s pilot of potential wake turbulence.
Andrews controllers ordered the Obama plane to execute a series of S-turns in a bid to create a safe distance, federal officials said. When they realized the cargo jet would not have time to get off the runway before the presidential plane arrived, they aborted landing of the Obama plane and ordered it to circle the airport.
The FAA, already dealing with a series of controversies involving controllers sleeping and watching a movie on the job, sent a team of investigators Tuesday to the Warrenton facility.
“In the grand scheme of things, events like this happen fairly frequently,” said a federal official who works with the air-traffic-control system but is not authorized to speak publicly. “Unfortunately, this one involves a presidential plane.”
The first lady’s office had no immediate comment.
