The near-misses at Sydney Airport

The near-misses at Sydney Airport

In the past month, there have been 3 incidents at Sydney Airport where planes came close to colliding on the ground. They followed days of mass delays and cancellations at our nation’s busiest airport, which authorities say were caused by air traffic control staff shortages. So in this Squiz Shortcut, we’ll look at:

• What happened in the 3 close shaves

• What the key players involved have had to say about it

• And what’s being done to stop it from happening again

🙋🏻‍♀️ This newsletter was written by Anna Pykett

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Squiz the Shortcut

Australia is one of the safest countries in the world when it comes to air safety - right?
Yep… In the air, we maintain a stellar safety record, but there have been a few issues of late on the ground at our busiest airport, Sydney, that’ve raised some serious questions about how traffic is being directed. It’s a big deal because the airport serves as a hub, handling more than 41 million passengers a year.

Fill me in on what’s happened recently…
There have been 3 different incidents at Sydney Airport in the past 3 weeks where planes could’ve collided on the runway if pilots hadn’t taken action. 

When was the first one?
It was on 27 July, when 2 Qantas planes - one arriving from Canberra, the other from New Zealand, were cleared to use the same runway at the same time. The plane from Canberra was landing while the other, from Queenstown, had already landed and was mistakenly cleared by air traffic control to taxi across the same active runway. Controllers quickly spotted the mistake and ordered the taxiing plane to stop immediately, avoiding a collision and ensuring both aircraft remained safely apart. No one was hurt, and neither plane was damaged.

What was the fallout?
Qantas said both planes had been cleared to proceed by air traffic control and this led to the Australian Transport Safety Bureau - that’s the transport watchdog - launching an investigation, which found that the breakdown of coordination that allowed the incident to happen was serious. That investigation is still going. 

Talk me through the others…
On Sunday, 9 August, 2 more runway incidents happened within hours of each other at Sydney Airport. The first involved a Jetstar plane headed for the Gold Coast that was preparing for takeoff at around 7am. The pilots had to slam on the brakes after seeing a Qatar Airways aircraft being towed across their path. 

Was anyone injured?
Yes… A Jetstar flight attendant reportedly suffered a broken wrist in the incident. Passengers described it as a kind of emergency stop, where they all suddenly lurched forwards. Jetstar said its aircraft had been “following instructions” when the pilots were forced to “brake firmly” to avoid an incident. 

Were there any repercussions?
Yep… An Airservices Australia air traffic controller and the tug driver who was towing the Qatar plane were temporarily stood down while an investigation into what happened took place. It led to some pretty firm words from the head of the ATSB, Angus Mitchell, who said: “Planes should not be getting that close and we should never have to rely on, as has happened in both these instances, pilots at the last minute making an emergency decision to prevent them coming together.” 

And there was another incident that day?
A few hours later, at around 10am, a Qantas plane headed for the Northern Territory crossed the path of a Virgin aircraft that was preparing to depart for Perth on the runway… The Qantas plane was about 1,200 metres ahead of where the Virgin Australia flight had started to take off, and the Virgin pilot spotted this, the crew reduced its thrust and the plane came to a stop on the runway. It led to yet another investigation…

Remind me exactly what air traffic controllers do?
Essentially, they direct traffic at airports and play a vital role in keeping the skies safe. They coordinate the movements and safe operation of thousands of aircraft, making sure all commercial and private planes operate safely and at an appropriate distance from each other. This involves directing aircraft during takeoff and landing, directing them around bad weather and generally ensuring that traffic flows smoothly with minimal delays.

And who’s in charge of them?
Airservices Australia, the organisation we mentioned earlier, is responsible for our air traffic controllers. It’s owned by the Federal Government and regulated by the Civil Aviation Safety Authority. Its website says it manages air traffic across 11% of the world's airspace - an area of 51.7 million square kilometres.

How much traffic is that?
It’s around 4 million aircraft movements into, out of, and across Oz airspace each year, carrying more than 152 million passengers. So it’s an incredibly important job, and by all accounts a challenging one too - it regularly shows up on lists of most stressful occupations because the stakes are so high. And we don’t have enough of them - an issue which has been causing mass delays and cancellations…

Why is there a shortage?
Federal Transport Minister Catherine King put the question to the CEO of Airservices Australia Rob Sharp last week. Sharp apologised and said they hadn’t recruited controllers fast enough since the COVID-19 pandemic… He said that having to slow the rate of take-offs and landings had caused delays. For context, reports say the day before the 2 incidents on 9 August, more than 150 flights through Sydney were delayed.

How big are the staffing gaps?
Sharp says Airservices Australia had relied too heavily on scheduled overtime to fill its rosters since work resumed post-COVID, leading to the current hiring gaps. Reports suggest between October 2021 and December 2022, more than 180 air traffic controllers accepted voluntary redundancies; many were incentivised to retire at a time when no one was travelling.

Why not just hire more?
Training new controllers can take years due to the complexity of the job. Airservices Australia’s website says its various paid training programs (which require all trainees to move to Melbourne where their academy is) take between 12-14 months and then require up to 6 months of on-the-job training.

Is there another way in?
Yep… That’s via the Royal Australian Air Force - its program takes up to 18 months for those who meet the entry requirements, and the starting salary for those who take that route is $80,857.

How hard is it to get accepted?
Very… The president of the air traffic controllers’ union Civil Air Scott Nugent says that only a very, very small number of people get through the application process - and when he says small, he means it. Out of 2,000 applicants, roughly 15 might pass the initial aptitude test.

How is that impacting the people already in the job?
Nugent says workloads are becoming unsustainable, with some staff reportedly working more than 20 hours of overtime a week. Minister King also noted an increase in unplanned leave requests over the August weekend when those 2 incidents happened within 3 hours of each other.

Does it affect safety in the air?
A 7.30 report back in 2024 said that while authorities insisted airspace was never unmonitored, workforce issues meant Airservices had to manage the workload across remaining staff. In practice, that can mean pilots being left to communicate with each other in the sky.

So what happens now?
The 3 investigations are ongoing and will take some time, and the boss of Airservices Australia says it will take the findings seriously. And it’s worth noting that the ATSB - the national transport safety watchdog - runs "no fault" fact-finding missions to prevent similar incidents from happening, rather than to punish anyone.

Any bigger picture concerns?
Some have raised questions about what all of this could mean for Australia’s reputation as a tourist destination… For its part, Sydney Airport plans to spend $6 billion growing passenger numbers to 72 million by 2045, so its Chief Executive Scott Charlton said it was important to address issues with Airservices so it can expand, but that safety was the priority. 

What has the Federal Government said about it?
Minister King says her department will continue to meet with Airservices Australia as well as stakeholders regularly, to keep working on solutions. She said training and supporting new air traffic controllers remained a priority, and that 95 new controllers are due to complete their training this year, and she’s confident Airservices Australia is doing "everything they can to get on top of this".

And there’s a new airport opening soon, right?
Yep… Western Sydney International Airport is preparing to open to passengers in October - and Airservices Australia says it’ll be the country’s first major airport without a traditional air traffic control tower. 

How will that work?
It says it’ll operate as a ‘digitised aerodrome,’ with state-of-the-art technology - including 25 cameras monitoring the airport and immediate airspace which will beam real-time vision to a centralised control room. It says this will provide ‘greater situational awareness to air traffic controllers’.

Just explain that a bit more…
Apparently these new air traffic management tools have features for things like object tracking, night vision and image enhancement, which Airservices says allows controllers to see better than with the human eye and use infrared cameras to see more in the dark and during periods of low visibility. 

Is all the tech working?
Not perfectly… Some of the images aren’t the best quality, and that’s forcing aircraft to be kept significantly further apart (as far as 27km) during landing for safety reasons. It means controllers need to allow 7-minute intervals between planes landing, which limits the number of flights an airport can handle and raises the chances of delays.

So the new airport is hitting some turbulence already?
We’ll have to wait and see if they get those issues sorted before the first passenger flight is set to take off from Western Sydney Airport on 25 October.

Onto our Recommendations

Reading: This piece by the ABC’s 7.30 on concerns about air traffic controller shortages and what role the pandemic played…

Reading: This article from Senior Lecturer in Aviation Dr Ugur Turhan who works at UNSW Canberra’s new Air Traffic Control Lab about what the future of air traffic control looks like…

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