A brush with death in the United States involving two airplanes. Last Wednesday on May 12, two small airplanes collided mid-air near Centennial Airport in Denver. But surprisingly, no one was hurt.
Last time, there was a close call at Barcelona’s El Prat Airport. An Airbus A340 aircraft belonging to an Argentinian airline company taxied across the runway when a Russian Jetliner was making its final approach. Fortunately, the pilot of the Russian jetliner reacted quickly by doing a go-around, and averted what could have been the worst air disaster on record.
This time, the accident happened near a small regional airport in a Denver suburb last Wednesday. Two small airplanes were getting ready to land at that airport when they collided mid-air.
The last mid-air collision happened in 1967, when Trans World Airlines Flight 553, enroute from Pittsburgh to Dayton, collided with a small general-aviation airplane near Urbana, Ohio. It goes without saying that all 25 people on board flight 553’s DC-9 aircraft dead, as was the sole occupant of the small aircraft that collided with the DC-9.
But this time, the mid-air collision was a far cry from the aforementioned mid-air collision happened in 1967: Miraculously, according to officials, both planes involved in the accident landed and no one was injured.
The pilot who requested the emergency landing was the only person aboard the twin-engine Fairchild Metroliner that landed at Centennial Airport. Not knowing his plane was nearly split in half, the pilot still successfully landed the plane. The damage to the Metroliner’s rear fuselage was in the “perfect location”, according to a professor of aerospace and occupational safety at the Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. “It was the flight deck: Bad outcome. The wings: Bad outcome. The tail: Bad outcome. It happened in the perfect place for the pilot to make it down.” Said Anthony Brickhouse.
The second plane involved in the accident was a single-engine 2016 Cirrus SR22. It was rented by Independence Aviation before the accident happened. A video featuring the plane landing with the help of a parachute went viral soon after being posted online. Also surviving the collision, the pilot successfully deployed the Cirrus Airframe Parachute System designed to slow the aircraft’s descent after a collision. The parachute system literally saved the life of the pilot, who was also the plane’s sole occupant. And the parachute system, manufactured by North Carolina-based BRS Aerospace, is believed to have saved at least a couple of hundred lives since its inception.
The Federal Aviation Administration says, according to its records, the Metroliner involved in this collision was operated by Key Lime Air, and aircraft operated by that airline have been involved in three fatal crashes.
As of Thursday, the lead NTSB investigator, John Brannen, had interviewed both pilots of the aircraft involved in the collision. Having retrieved the flight data from the data and voice recorders of both planes, the National Transportation Safety Board said a preliminary report will be published in the next two weeks, but it expects the investigation will last for 12 to 18 months as it has yet to interview the air traffic controllers who worked with both pilots.
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