There’s some fascinating air traffic control audio of a private jet departing Teterboro Airport (TEB) essentially flying directly into the path of a United Airlines wide body aircraft landing at Newark Airport (EWR). This private jet pilot seems wholly unprepared to fly in such busy airspace (especially with his lack of situational awareness), but some blame also has to go to the air traffic controller…
In this post:
Pilot & ATC struggle to communicate, leading to close call
YouTube channel You can see ATC has air traffic control audio and a visualization of an incident that happened on the evening of July 8, 2026. It primarily involves a Hawker 800XP with the registration code N58DH, flying from Teterboro to Merida, Mexico (MID). Then there’s also United flight UA1981, a Boeing 787-10 approaching Newark from Los Angeles (LAX).
There’s no point in transcribing the air traffic control audio, because I’d just be typing out eight minutes worth of miscommunication. But as the air traffic controller says at the end, “you have disregarded every single instruction.”
Among other things, the private jet gets in the path of the United Dreamliner, to the point that the heavy jet has a TCAS RA, requiring the pilots to take action to avoid a possible collision.
This audio is just painful to listen to. The guy basically doesn’t follow a single instruction, and also completely lacks situational awareness, especially given the busy airspace he’s flying in. Obviously English isn’t this guy’s first language, but even so, you’d hope that he’d be better prepared than this. I assume he’s a professional corporate pilot, in which case you’d kind of hope for a bit more, no?
ATC bears quite a bit of responsibility here as well
I will say, I don’t think it’s fair to completely blame the pilot here, as the air traffic controller played a contributing role in this as well. I get that controllers are busy and there are a lot of things for them to focus on, but from the beginning, he didn’t do a great job with this interaction, as I see it:
- The controller initially gave the pilot the instruction to fly a heading of 260, but instead, he read back a heading of 200, and the air traffic controller didn’t catch that; if that had been caught, it would’ve prevented a lot of the subsequent issues
- Given that English was not the pilot’s first language, the controller’s verbose instructions and fast talking probably didn’t help with minimizing the odds of miscommunication
- It seems like the extended conversation between the controller and the United pilot should’ve happened off frequency in such busy airspace, especially with the other pilot still seemingly confused
- When the pilot was confused about the altitude and asked if he should be climbing to 15,000 feet (rather than the 6,000 feet that was instructed), there was no response on that from the controller
On the plus side, kudos to the United pilots for their professionalism.
Bottom line
A Hawker 800XP and a United Boeing 787 got uncomfortably close between Teterboro and Newark, to the point that the Dreamliner got a TCAS RA. This issue stems from a miscommunication between the private jet pilot and the air traffic controller. Clearly the pilot’s first language wasn’t English, and on top of that, he didn’t seem properly prepared to be flying in airspace this congested.
Unfortunately he read back instructions incorrectly, and the controller didn’t catch that, which then had a chain reaction.
What do you make of this ATC interaction, and where the fault lies?
I make it that the Hawker crew needs to NEVER see the inside of a cockpit EVER again... Blatent incompetence.
Pilot: Was that for 58DH?
ATC; *proceeds to shoot 10 words in 5 seconds again, with the callsign being completely unintelligible*
What is the point of these posts? I can just subscribe to that ATC Youtube channel too. I don't get it. These posts are so often now
The point of these posts, I would assume, is that readers enjoy them. I know I do. On the other hand, there are certain posts that I don't care about, and guess what? I scroll past them without complaining.
Came before the woke mob defends the unskilled pilot (both as a pilot and in english fluency), blame the USA and Capitalism, say the ATC is racist and we all have to learn Spanish. And of course, it's trumps fault at the end of the day.
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
/s
Can we not have even one post where trump is not brought into it? He has literally zero to do with this. Five minutes without thinking about trump is all we ask.....
Plane isn’t even based in the US it seems (US trust got it registered with FAA) but yeah let’s make it about “DEI” or whatever. I got my daily calorie goal just rolling my eyes at this BS.
As someone who lives in a country with more than one official language I cannot understand why so few Americans make even a token effort to learn Spanish. In Miami where Ben lives it is more commonly spoken than English.
To state that "ATC made a mess" is a total distortion of the facts. The ONLY mistake ATC made was not to catch the wrong readback. Other than that the Controller managed the situation very well - given the circumstances. His instructions were clear and concise. And I do not agree at all that the Controller should have kept the conversation with the United flight "for later". If he did not have any other aircraft...
To state that "ATC made a mess" is a total distortion of the facts. The ONLY mistake ATC made was not to catch the wrong readback. Other than that the Controller managed the situation very well - given the circumstances. His instructions were clear and concise. And I do not agree at all that the Controller should have kept the conversation with the United flight "for later". If he did not have any other aircraft on frequency, it was a good thing that he explained the situation right there and then. It is very clear that you judge a behaviour you do not have any experience about.
And for the record: I used to work as a Contoller for about 15 years,
I have to agree Alex, as an almost 30 year controller in various countries I don't find alot wrong with the controller beyond the miss of the readback of the heading.
That clearly was a big miss and can't happen. That said also I recall an incident I was involved in over 20 years ago when a Spanair plane I was working I gave a heading of 150 to and he climbed to FL150...
I have to agree Alex, as an almost 30 year controller in various countries I don't find alot wrong with the controller beyond the miss of the readback of the heading.
That clearly was a big miss and can't happen. That said also I recall an incident I was involved in over 20 years ago when a Spanair plane I was working I gave a heading of 150 to and he climbed to FL150 into conflict with other traffic. We listened to the tapes afterwards and even with 6 of us listening and playing it back over 10 times knowing what happened none of us heard the word heading due to the pilot's accent. We all heard 150 but heading/FL was completely unintelligible.
It's all very well listening to these YouTube videos but nobody knows exactly what was heard on the headset at the time.
As to the conversation after really I don't get the criticism. It's impossible to make judgements based off these YT videos because we have no idea what was edited out, and if teimescales are compressed or not. IF the radio calls we here are all in real time with nothing edited out the frequency wasn't busy. The United pilot was given a brief explanation of what happened in case he needed to file a report, which he then confirmed he did. Then tje controller provided further information for the United crew which they seemed to appreciate while he continued to control the traffic effectively.
58DH was only ever cleared to 6,000 multiple times which was read back correctly by the crew, there was absolutely zero reason for them to ever start climbing, the controller didn't need to keep repeating that over and over because it already been passed and acknowledged several times already.
The 58DH crew sound like an incident waiting to happen with absolutely no attention being paid and zero situational awareness.
Controllers don't have time to play babysitter, professional pilots are expected to be exactly that and be competent enough to follow basic instructions and to pay attention when operating in complex, high density airspace.
Too many airplanes , too busy atc , too many possibilities of error , too much too much .
Another crappy corporate pilot
The FlightAware graph doesn't really match up with the narrative. In any case, the plane is safely back in Mexico now.
https://www.flightaware.com/live/flight/N58DH/history/20260708/2300Z/KTEB/MMMD/tracklog