The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is looking into a recent close call involving a Frontier Airlines plane and a pair of trucks at Los Angeles International Airport.
According to CBS News, the flight was carrying 217 passengers and seven crew members and traveling at roughly 15 mph when it was apparently cut off by the vehicle traffic.
"We just had two trucks cut us off," the pilot can be heard saying in ATC audio. "We had to slam on the brakes to not hit them."
"It happened so fast. I have to go check on the flight attendants in the back. It was real close, closest I've ever seen," the pilot told air traffic controllers.
Brian Sinclair, a former F-18 pilot and instructor at the U.S. Naval Academy, attributed the close call to a blind spot for air traffic controllers. He told CBS News that "there are three specific locations at LAX that ground people in the tower cannot see the taxiways."
The incident comes less than one month after an Air Canada jet crashed into a fire truck on a runway at New York's LaGuardia Airport, killing both pilots and injuring dozens of passengers.
That incident came just days after a close call at nearby Newark Liberty International Airport.
"In my 20 years of naval aviation, a lot of lessons learned were written in blood, i.e., we had fatalities," Sinclair told CBS News. "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."
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