Two Volaris Planes Nearly Collide At Mexico City Airport

It's really sad as Mexico City is a fantastic place to visit with amazing food and people.

They also were going to get an amazing new airport but they lost that too (the military airfield one was not the original plan and is a lot worse for many reasons)

This story is missing a few critical details:

- Mexican President Lopez Obrador rushed to open a new airport as a replacement for the current airport.

- There have been an alarming number of incidents involving either near collisions on runways, planes circling until fuel is dangerously low or close calls with controlled flight into to terrain as pilots are asked to go into holding positions prior to landing.

- Air traffic controllers have been complaining for some time that they haven't had sufficient training to adjust to the newly configured airspace with two airports instead of just one.

- Most importantly, Victor Manuel Hernandez, director of the Mexican Navigation in Airspace Service (SENEAM) resigned last week after they initially denied complaints about worsening safety. This seems to suggest that the dangers are real, although two Mexico City newspapers have suggested that the order to ignore pilots and air traffic controllers came from the presidency. Both papers drew parallels to the recent collapse of a segment of the newly inaugurated Metro Line 12.

This appears related to the president's promise to deliver infrastructure within the time frame of a six year presidency.

I, too, wish that the proposed airport had been built. While it had the bloat typical of large scale federal projects, there is no real pathe for the newly inaugurated airport to relieve congestion as it adds two hours of road travel to every journey.

As a Mexican I have to say that the current government is a disaster, among other bad things they put inexperienced people in charge of air operations. The inept person who was in the control tower that day gave the order to the plane to land without paying attention to what he was doing, it is even rumored that he was distracted looking at his cell phone, which is forbidden for control tower employees. By pure miracle the two planes did not collide, Volaris management is furious and demanded the government to fix the problem as soon as possible. Let's hope they do something, because this is a time bomb.

Sadly, this scenario has played out before but with fatal consequences.
In 1991 a Skywest commuter plane was cleared to taxi into position and hold on runway 24L at LAX. It was after dark and this was before major airports had ground radar systems to monitor aircraft positions on the airfield. At the same time a USAir 737 was on final approach to the same runway. The controller was distracted and forgot the Skywest playing sitting on the runway waiting to take off and gave USAir clearance to land.
USAir followed directions and landed...unfortunately right on top of the Skywest airplane, resulting in complete destruction of the Skywest airplane with total loss of life. The USAir 737 was also destroyed but some of the passengers survived.