A Close Call at 30,000 Feet

On Aug. 4, just four days before nine people died in a mid-air collision over New York City’s Hudson River, I was a passenger aboard a Northwest Airlines DC-9 en route from Tucson to Minneapolis.

For this leg of my trip to my final destination of Indianapolis, I was one of the lucky few to be seated next to a window. Around the flight’s halfway point, traveling north at a cruising altitude of about 30,000 feet somewhere over northern Colorado, I took a break from my book and casually glanced out the window, curious whether I would see snow atop the Rocky Mountains. I saw no snow, but what I did see a relatively short distance below gave me the chills.

It was another commercial airliner within spitting distance – its nose pointing northwest, locked to the 10 o’clock position, approaching on what looked to me like a T-bone collision course with my packed plane. I spun around to call a stewardess, but changed my mind. We were doomed. Without a miracle, within seconds, I and my fellow passengers would all be dead, vaporized in a ball of fire.

Pressing my nose against the pane, I gaped into the cloudless sky and steeled for the outlaw plane to slam into us. But ... where was it? I swept my gaze from left to right and bottom to top. I gasped! Where had it gone? I rolled my eyeballs heavenward, and there I found evidence revealing the intruder aircraft’s alarmingly close proximity: its cotton-candy jet stream just inches overhead. Its path had cleared us as it had flown over.

Expecting an outburst of panic from other passengers who, like me, had seen the near-catastrophic event, I scanned the cabin for signs of emotion. But no one appeared out of sorts. OK, well surely the pilot would make an announcement. But none came. Was I the sole witness to this marginally missed mid-air mayhem that would have consumed hundreds of lives in a mere moment? Apparently I was.

Hours later, safely grounded in my own home, I couldn’t let go of what I had seen. Someone had made a serious error, and I believed it was my responsibility to report it. So, I dutifully called the FAA. Failing to get hold of an actual live FAA representative, I followed the recorded instructions and left a detailed message. A week later, I received this email response:

“Thank you for contacting the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Aviation Safety Hotline. The FAA enacted reduced vertical separation minimums (RVSM) several years ago, which allows for a minimum of 1,000 feet of vertical separation between two aircraft at cruising altitudes. This was done as a result of advances in avionics technology which can more accurately determine an aircraft's position. ... Based upon the information you have provided, it appears that the aircraft you saw was a legal distance from your aircraft.”

OK, let’s think about this for a moment. The FAA allows 1,000 feet of separation between two aircraft at cruising altitudes – a thousand feet, approximately a fifth of a mile. But how many miles of open, unoccupied sky are up there? When I’m driving my Saturn down the highway, for safety’s sake I maintain one car length for every 10 miles per hour of speed. Shouldn’t the FAA apply that same rule of thumb to airplanes?

I’ve done a little research and made a few calculations. Here’s what I found. According to Boeing.com, the average length of a DC-9 is 120 feet. Its average speed at cruising altitude is 570 mph. Now do the math. Applying the minimum car-lengths rule to planes at cruising altitude, they should maintain a distance of AT LEAST 6,840 feet – nearly seven times greater than the FAA minimum requirement.

According to an article in today’s Daily Beast, “On a typical American airline, your chances of dying on an airplane flight are somewhere around one in 13 million.”

I suppose that’s meant to be comforting. But it’s not. But then again, this morning I heard that the New York Lottery had swelled to $252 million. And what are those odds? According to About.com, the chance of winning is one in 175,711,536.

So, I guess there’s a strong probability that I will no sooner die in a plane crash than I will win the lottery.

But still, regardless of mathematical odds, 1,000 feet is too dang close.