A potential disaster was averted Friday when a Phoenix air traffic controller recognized two American Airlines jets mistakenly were flying the same flight number and acted quickly to avoid confusion and keep them a safe distance apart.

Incident Details

Audio of the incident shortly after midnight Friday shows how he found a solution to ensure the planes that were both called American 2482 maintained proper separation as one plane arrived from Chicago shortly after the other had taken off in Phoenix.

The controller kept the arriving plane safely above the departing plane even as their flight paths converged and made sure that the pilots of both airlines saw each other when they were still miles apart. He also directed the departing plane not to climb too high, so a gap would remain between the planes.

Aviation safety expert Steve Arroyo said it’s likely that someone inside the airline’s dispatch center failed to catch that both planes would be in the air at the same time with identical flight numbers when both the dispatcher and the pilots signed off on the flight plan.

The Federal Aviation Administration and American Airlines will investigate how this happened, and they both emphasized how glad they were that everyone remained safe.

Original reporting: Richardson, TX News (HLL/CB) — read the source article.