Travel safety

A Boeing 737 filled with 146 British tourists on their way to a holiday in Majorca Monday, Sept. 3, narrowly avoided crashing into another plane at the Palma Airport on the island of Majorca, Spain.

The plane was already into its final approach to landing when the pilot saw another jetliner on the runway preparing to take off.

The pilot reacted immediately and pulled up sharply in an emergency maneuver, and managed to avoid the other plane by a few hundred feet. At speeds of 150 miles per hour (or about 220 feet per second), a few hundred feet will take very few seconds to cover.

The pilot had no time to inform the passengers of the emergency maneuver he was about to make. Since they were on their landing approach, the passengers were already strapped into their seats anyway and nobody was hurt by the sudden acceleration upwards.

Some of the 146 passengers did panic. One passenger said it was absolutely terrifying. They were looking out the window, and could see their plane coming in to land, wheels already down. To their amazement (and near terror) their plane suddenly jerked upward and soared in a steep climb up into the sky.

Most of the passengers screamed, nearly drowning out the roar of the engines as the pilot let loose all available engine power to complete the emergency maneuver. For a few seconds, the passengers did not know what was happening, although they could only surmise there was some kind of emergency. They were pinned back into their seats by the force of the acceleration, but they could see fuel tanks before that which indicated how close they were to the ground.

The pilot then circled the airport before finally making the landing. The flight had left Manchester airport at 7:25am on Monday.

It was operated by bmibaby, the budget flights division of bmi airlines, formerly known as British Midland airlines. A company spokesman said the captain reported that he was already approaching the airport but was forced to abort the landing approach because of the other plane already on the tarmac.

The Palma airport on Majorca is the third busiest airport in Spain, with 20 million passenger arrivals.

As a safety review measure, incidents involving planes that pass within 1,000ft of each other must be reported and investigated to determine if there existed a risk to both aircraft and passengers. In 2006, there were 87 near misses involving commercial jetliners and eight of these close brushes were found to be dangerous.