The Crowded Sky

The statistic in a confidential report prepared for the Federal Aviation Agency was enough to shake even the most seasoned air traveler: during the average 24 hours, eight near misses occur between planes in flight over the U.S. A near miss means that two planes came so close that they would have collided if one pilot or the other had not detected the danger and taken action to escape it.

For that matter, actual mid-air collisions occur much oftener than most people realize. Federal agencies have recorded seven so far this year in U.S. airspace, and a total of 438 (most of them involving small planes) during the past quarter century. The collision danger increases steadily as more and more planes take to the air, and as air speeds increase. The faster planes are traveling, the less time pilots have to avoid a threatened collision. Once two high-speed jets on a collision course get within a mile of each other, a crash is inevitable: at 600 m.p.h. they will close the one-mile gap in three seconds.

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