Esther

An Air France jet leaving LAX just after midnight Saturday turned the wrong way and ended up less than a mile from an American Airlines plane. When the controller asked the pilots why they turned, they said "give me a minute." Just before that turn, those same pilots had read back the instruction they were about to break, word for word. To understand why that's so unsettling, you have to know how LAX gets planes off the ground. LAX has two pairs of runways, one north of the terminals and one south. Jets take off from both sides right after each other, sometimes at the exact same moment. The FAA allows that because each plane gets a published route, and the two routes have to fan apart by at least 15 degrees right after takeoff. For that first minute, the routes are what keep the planes apart. Both crews just have to fly them. Air France 28 took off from the north side headed for Tahiti, on a route called SUMMR2 that goes out over the Pacific. American 1660 left about a minute later from the south side, headed to Dallas. Departure control told Air France to "climb via SID," which is pilot shorthand for fly the published route. The crew said it right back. "Climbing via SID." You can see it in the captions of the video. Then the A350 banked left, toward the American jet's path. The controller spotted it on radar and jumped in. Air France got "fly heading 270 immediately." American got a traffic alert, a plane at 12 o'clock less than a mile away, and an order to stay at 2,000 feet, so the crew stopped climbing. Flight tracking from Wingbits shows the two jets got as close as 0.76 nautical miles, with about 300 feet of altitude between them at one point. The normal minimum is 3 miles or 1,000 feet. At takeoff speeds, 0.76 miles goes by in something like 14 seconds. Once the planes were apart, the controller started asking questions, and it gets uncomfortable to listen to. Why did you turn to a heading? "Standby." What departure were you told to fly? "Give me a minute." It took more than a minute of back and forth before the crew confirmed it was SUMMR2, the same route they'd already read back. The controller told them it was a possible pilot deviation and gave them a phone number to call. As of Sunday, neither Air France nor the FAA has said why the plane turned. Every instruction in aviation gets repeated back like that so the controller can be sure the pilot heard it right. On Saturday that check worked perfectly, and it still didn't stop the turn. What stopped it was one person at SoCal Departure, at 12:16 in the morning, watching a radar screen closely enough to notice a line bend the wrong way. Back in March at LaGuardia, the last line of defense was also a controller. That controller was juggling a separate emergency, cleared a fire truck onto a runway with an Air Canada jet landing on it, and both pilots died. The last thing on Saturday's tape is the LAX controller apologizing to the American crew for a turn they had nothing to do with. Their answer was "Great job, thank you."