Hundreds of travelers have come close to death, without even realizing it.
On Saturday February 24, an Ethiopian Airlines Airbus A350-900, flying between Addis Ababa (Ethiopia) and Dubai (United Arab Emirates), narrowly avoided a mid-air collision with a Qatar Airways Boeing 787, in road from Doha to Entebbe in Uganda.
At 12:32 p.m. local time, the Qatar Airways flight,
“which was flying at a constant altitude (38,000 feet), was wrongly informed by controllers in Mogadishu (in Somalia, Editor’s note) to climb to 40,000 feet
,” said in a press release. civil aviation of Somaliland, a state bordering Somalia.
At that time, the Ethiopian A350 was cruising at 39,000 feet, in the opposite direction.
This error led the two planes to end up at almost the same altitude, over the Gulf of Aden, an extremely dangerous situation in the air.
Fortunately, both planes' TCAS (Traffic Collision Avoidance System) collision warning systems functioned properly, signaling the dangerous proximity between the two aircraft.
Using TCAS, the pilots were able to coordinate vertical evasive maneuvers, one ascending and the other descending, thereby avoiding an imminent collision.
Without these warnings, a catastrophe could have occurred.
An investigation was opened into this incident by the Somali civil aviation to understand the exact circumstances.
Also read: Savoie: collision between a tourist plane and a helicopter
Strained relationships
This incident highlights the stormy relations between Somalia and its neighbor, Somaliland, a separatist region of this state in the Horn of Africa and a self-proclaimed republic since 1991, not recognized internationally.
In the sky, the two states are fighting for the management of the region's airspace.
In 2019, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) gave management of Somalia's airspace to the Somali authorities.
In its press release published on Saturday, the Somaliland civil aviation accuses its Somali counterpart of having made a mistake.
On the other hand, Somalia has already accused Somaliland in the past of
“misdirecting the planes”.
In Somalia, we are trying to reassure the population.
“The Somali Civil Aviation Agency (SCAA) assures all Somali citizens and airlines using Somali air that it fully controls the safety of Somali aircraft.
There is no insecurity and safety danger in Somali skies
,” the authority wrote on Facebook on Saturday after the near-miss.
This narrowly avoided collision comes a few months after a similar incident in the United States.
Last November, an American Airlines plane and a Tradewind Aviation plane came close to crashing while landing at the same time at New York's JFK Airport.
This type of incident would not be that rare across the Atlantic.
Last summer, a report from the United States Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), revealed by the
New York Times,
claimed that 46 plane accidents had been narrowly avoided in the United States in the month of July 2023. Proof that the subject is taken seriously in the country of Uncle Sam, the American Secretary of Transport Pete Buttigieg admitted in March 2023 to USA Today to be
“worried”
, and assured that his administration was trying
“to see closer and do a deeper analysis to see what's going on
.