A potentially horrific collision was prevented at Ben-Gurion International Airport on Tuesday by the vigilance of the control tower. An Airbus A320 from EasyJet Airline began heading down a runway without being cleared, at the same time an executive plane was touching down on another lane. The control tower agent realized what was unfolding and ordered the pilot to halt immediately, thereby preventing a collision.

According to Ynet, the incident took place just before 7:30PM. The Airbus A320 EasyJet plane, which took off for Venice in a westward direction on Runway 26, was stopped after it began its takeoff without authorization following a directive from an inspector in the control tower. The inspector spotted the executive jet, a Bombardier Challenger 350 aircraft from Austria that had begun landing on Runway 12 that intersected with the track the EasyJet plane trying to take off.

This is not the first-time a near-miss incident occurred at Ben-Gurion Airport. In January of this year a serious disaster was prevented when a FedEx cargo plane that arrived from Athens to Ben-Gurion Airport was forced to perform a sharp maneuver in the air in order to avoid a collision with a UN plane that took off from S’dei Dov Airport against standard protocol.

The two aircraft were at a speed of 700 kilometers per hour and a few dozen meters opposite each other off the Tel Aviv shoreline, and the Boeing 757 cargo plane pilot noticed the King Air plane opposite it, managed to maneuver in the air, thus preventing a major disaster. The incident was probed by investigators in the Ministry of Transport.

(YWN Israel Desk – Jerusalem)