A pilot flying a Delta Air Lines regional jet on Friday apologized to his passengers after making a hard turn to avoid colliding with a US Air Force B-52 bomber, audio from the incident shows.
The incident occurred on SkyWest Flight 3788, which was operating as a Delta Connection flight, from Minneapolis, Minnesota, to Minot, North Dakota, SkyWest said in a statement.
The flight landed safely in Minot “after being cleared for approach by the tower but performed a go-around when another aircraft became visible in their flight path,” the statement read.
Are we having air traffic control fall out? Having a close call and then someone in your flight path again isn’t great.
I mean, the ATC pipeline has already had issues for some decades when it comes to adding new recruits, and then DOGE came in and decided to offer buyouts and fire random employees on top of that. It’s only a matter of time before you get more accidents like the one in DC.
Also you will start seeing folks leave from burnout and overwork sooner or later. Because that’s the corpo way, fucked over your workforce and need to desperately high more people? Nope just work the current ones to the bone until the whole situation inevitably spirals into an irreparable mess.
The rail companies are gonna be making bank on parcel and letter delivery when the planes get permanently grounded because nobody wants to operate a business with no ATC. Also wonder how long till we start seeing state level run ATC?
Nah, it’s always the prelude to privatisation. Someone will start up an ATC company and just take over the whole thing.
Doesn’t mean the ATC won’t still collapse, knowing how this shit tends to go they’d probably gut the existing systems so badly that most companies would pull out of the industry at least in the US. Boeing’s fuck ups have driven down air travel relatively recently, it’s entirely possible airports would lose insurance and be shut down by the cities if things got bad enough one or two jets smashing into a suburb would be enough.
Remember these folks are evil, greedy, and stupid. Not saying they can’t capture objectives but holding them? That’s another question.
Oh of course, privatisation of infrastructure always ends up worse and more expensive. Look at the US railroads.
At least with rails the absolute worst that can happen is a chemical spill, with planes and jets it could be as bad as a chemical airburst not even factoring in debris fields and other secondary shit. Frankly speaking I don’t think there is anyways to have a minimum viable ATC with a corporation at least not a publicly traded one since they’d probably sell it to some publicly traded company that’ll be bunk in five years.
I mean, you can have worse than chemical spills with trains. You can have entire towns blowing up. But yeah, you’ll probably get even worse with ATC.
And holy shit will it be worse.
No they won’t. Remember, Regan set the present that he can fire them. And get new ones.
*fire them and then fail to find enough new ones for decades
It’s that second part that’s tricky.
wonder how long till we start seeing state level run ATC
They’ll find a way to move it to the private sector before that.
I am not surprised to see they’ve already been trying. I am glad to see there is already organized opposition to the privatization of the FAA. https://nbaa.org/advocacy/legislative-and-regulatory-issues/faa-reauthorization-and-modernization/truth-atc-privatization/
It’s cool bruh we’ll just have xAI run the show using their Nazi bot who will prioritize flights based on how Jewish their passengers’ last names sound
Just saw a YouTube vid on this with the pilot apologising and the comments were blaming “DEI”. i felt so tempted to ask them what part of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion they have a problem with
YouTube comments are full of the most braindead people on Earth
There’s a reason “don’t read the comments” is a cliche
The tower involved was not a Federal Aviation Administration tower
Pardon? Who is operating a tower in North Dakota apart from the FAA? What is going on here? Why is there a tower in our United States that the FAA does not control?
“Long story short, it was not fun, I do apologize for it and thank you for understanding,”
lol, understatement
If I had to venture a guess I’d say it was probably the tower at nearby Minot AFB. Perhaps the commercial flight’s approach took them over the bases’ airspace or something.
I’m having trouble coming to grips with us having multiple air controllers. I thought everything was FAA and the military had to coordinate with them.
Good thing I don’t fly an airplane, I suppose.
They use the same ATC systems and protocols, so handoffs between airspace should be the same whether it’s a military or FAA tower.
So there’s a whole other ATC controlled by the military? I honestly have no knowledge of this and am surprised.
Kind of. It is more the same system, just some towers are operated by the military and some by the FAA. Each has their own airspace they are responsible for, but civilian aircraft can fly through airspace managed by military ATC and vice versa.
I’m not sure why it is like that nowadays. I guess in the beginning of ATC in the US it made sense for air bases to control the nearby airspace, and it probably just went from there, with maybe consolidation of towers as a cost-cutting measure along the way.
Caveat: it’s been years since I’ve had to know any of this, so this might be outdated or misremembered.
So why didn’t the military tower catch the helicopter in that DC crash? The FAA failed but the Army also failed? Two failures?
I’ve not read the report, but there’d only be one tower responsible for the airspace. Iirc, it was an FAA tower. What I heard happened was that the helicopter didn’t follow the tower’s instructions. But, again, I’m months out of date on that incident.
Imagine airspace like a tray of cookies baked too-close together. Some are bigger than others, some are weird shapes, some are sugar cookies, some are chocolate. But it’s a tray full of cookie. There’s only one cookie at each spot.
To stretch the metaphor further, imagine an ant walking across the tray. It’s still only on one cookie at a time and it doesn’t care if it’s chocolate or sugar. At the edge of a cookie there’s a handoff between cookies, where cookie A says “hey, cookie B, an Ant X is about to walk on you. Don’t let them crash into any other ants, k? They’re your responsibility now.”
Anyways, I’m going to go let my caffeine kick in.
Im just hearing about this too, but that doesnt surprise me at all. Government black ops in mind, you can’t have civilian ATC personnel having classified information on the location of military aircraft nor their capabilities. Of course the military is going to have their own branch responsible for handling sesnitive info.
Nah, I always thought that military shit flew through FAA ATC and they just handed it off to the next. I don’t know what to think now.
My guess is the Air Force. Iirc, the Army and Navy also operate their own ATC. I didn’t know they did approach control for civilian aircraft, but that seems to be the case.
WTF? I thought all air traffic was FAA, guess I was wrong.
Kudos to the pilot for handling the situation admirably
HEGSETH!
A similar incident happened earlier this year: https://edition.cnn.com/2025/03/28/us/delta-military-jet-close-call-dca/index.html
Should it be the other way around?
In aircraft and boats, the more maneuverable craft has the responsibility to evade. Since this flight was going to a small airport in North Dakota, I’m guessing it’s a small commuter plane that’s much smaller than a B-52.
Pilot here: while that is generally true, for aviation the rule is that aircraft types that are in the same category have to give way to landing aircraft. Ie, a hot air balloon doesn’t need to give way to a landing fixed wing but a fixed wing and fixed wing do need to give way to the landing aircraft.
The Delta pilot should be commended and the B52 should have been more aware of their situation.
In addition, ATC clearance generally means you have right of way especially on a landing approach.
Thank you for sharing.
In addition, ATC clearance generally means you have right of way especially on a landing approach.
I have to quibble with that a bit. An ATC clearance has no impact on right of way. IFR flights in VMC are still required to see and avoid.
True that landing aircraft has right of way, although I’m not aware of any interpretation that simply being cleared for or on an approach is enough… unless you’re on the final approach segment you aren’t really “landing” yet. (I have no idea if that was the case here or not).
This isn’t news.
A B52 flying in non training airspace is News. That same B52 causing issues with civilian an aircraft is News.
Tell me how either of this let along both are not news.
This is national news in the US, yet this is the general “News” community. Maybe that’s what they are referring to.
… then what it’s?
I just had a stroke trying to read that.
Idn’t no about but you, that perfectly clear was to my.
Oh’ts ure itall fun an dgame sunt’l xmoke attk
Yeah it was a go around. Not newsworthy at all. It’s actually a correct and a fairly routine response. The fact that it was a military plane is the only reason it was given any traction. And that’s not a unique occurrence either!
Funny how the most down voted person is the only correct one here.
Hell I’ve made military jets perform a go around because of me being too slow on approach. God forbid that hits the national news! “Local 172 pilot wastes taxpayer funds by flying anemic plane”
I’m glad someone else realizes this. This happens on a daily occurrence folks. It really isn’t news.
I’ve been slowly finding out that, the more about a subject I know, the more ridiculous the people on Lemmy are…
