A JetBlue Airways Airbus A320 suffered a tail strike during take-off in January 2022 after the pilots rotated too soon to avoid colliding with a small oncoming aircraft.
That is according to the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), which says the pilots experienced “expectation bias” – they assumed, despite contradictory information, that the small aircraft was approaching from a different direction.
Both aircraft landed safely. But the event is another in a series of recent near-collisions involving large US commercial aircraft.
The incident resulted from “the captain’s rotation of the airplane pitch before the rotation speed on take-off due to his surprise about encountering head-on landing traffic, which resulted in an exceedance of the airplane’s pitch limit and a subsequent tail strike,” says the NTSB’s final report, released on 13 December.
The 22 January 2022 incident involved JetBlue flight 1748 from Yampa Valley airport in Hayden, Colorado to Fort Lauderdale. Because Yampa Valley airport has no control tower, pilots operating there received instructions from Denver-area controllers. They also communicated with each other using a common radio frequency.
At about 11:50 local time, as the JetBlue pilots prepared to taxi their A320 (registration N760JB) to Yampa’s single runway, pilots of an inbound Beechcraft B300 King Air reported on the common frequency that they were “nine minutes out” and planned to land on runway 10.
The King Air pilots then announced a change, saying they would now land on runway 28. Over the next several minutes they reported several times they were coming “straight in” to that runway.
The JetBlue pilots, meanwhile, announced their intention to take-off on runway 10 – toward the oncoming King Air. They received clearance to do so at 11:55, but the Denver controller specified a “two-minute clearance time” – meaning the clearance expired after 2min.
The NTSB says the JetBlue crew still thought the King Air was landing on runway 10 – meaning approaching from behind, in the same direction they were to take-off. As a result of that misconception, the JetBlue pilots thought they should expedite their departure to keep ahead of the traffic, the NTSB concludes.
“The crew’s expectation that the King Air was arriving on runway 10 biased their perception of incoming information, such that contradictory evidence (radio calls indicating the King Air was landing on runway 28) was ignored or manipulated in the brain to be consistent with the person’s current expectation,” says the report. “This bias occurs as part of basic information processing, and a person may not be actively aware of such biases at the perceptual level.”
The JetBlue pilots began their take-off roll, during which they discussed the location of the Beechcraft, with the first officer asking the captain if the other aircraft was actually on the runway.
Realising the mistake, “JetBlue’s captain pitched the airplane up 24kt before rotation speed, to avoid the approaching King Air”, and turned right, the NTSB says. “When JetBlue began its right turn after departure from runway 10, the King Air was on a reciprocal course with 2.27nm of separation between the converging airplanes.”
After ascending to about 20,000ft, the JetBlue pilots contacted their maintenance department to report a suspected tail strike. They diverted to Denver, with no injuries.
The NTSB describes the incident as similar to a 1996 collision between a United Express Beechcraft 1900C and a King Air, at Quincy, Illinois. The NTSB attributed that accident, which killed 14 people, to the King Air pilots failing to effectively monitor the common radio frequency.
Neither the Federal Aviation Administration nor JetBlue responded to requests for comment.
The FAA has recently sought to address the risk of runway collisions following several close calls in the last year.
