The Federal Aviation Administration has opened an investigation after a Frontier Airlines plane nearly collided with two trucks on a taxiway at Los Angeles International Airport. No one was injured in the close call, but the pilot on the radio said the jet had to stop hard to avoid hitting the vehicles.
“We just had two trucks cut us off,” the pilot said in air traffic control audio. “We had to slam on the brakes to not hit them.” He added, “It happened so fast,” before telling the tower, “I have to go check on the flight attendants in the back. It was real close, closest I’ve ever seen.” Frontier said the flight carried 217 passengers and seven crew members, and praised the pilots for their quick thinking.
The episode came on a busy ground day at LAX, where cars and aircraft move on separate lanes but still share a tightly managed airfield. The plane was traveling at roughly 15 mph when the trucks entered its path, a low speed that helped keep a bad situation from becoming much worse. LAX has not said who was driving the trucks, and the airport has not released information about the drivers.
Brian Sinclair said the tower likely missed the incident because it happened in a blind spot. He said there are three specific locations at LAX where ground personnel in the tower cannot see the taxiways. Sinclair also said there was no damage to equipment and no one was hurt, calling the event a reminder that close calls can still teach a hard lesson. “In my 20 years of naval aviation, a lot of lessons learned were written in blood, i.e., we had fatalities,” he said. “Here is a perfect example of a get-out-of-jail-free lesson learned. Nobody was hurt. No equipment was damaged, and still there's a lesson to be had here.”
The LAX incident stands apart from last month’s collision at New York’s LaGuardia Airport, where two pilots died. Kris Van Cleave said there are moments when vehicle lanes and aircraft lanes intersect at LAX, but “the rules of the road still apply.” He added, “You got to yield for the bigger vehicle,” and said this case was not like LaGuardia, where vehicles were responding to an emergency, crossing an active runway and under direct air traffic control. The FAA probe will now determine how two trucks got into the jet’s path and whether the airport’s ground procedures left room for the near miss.
