A Southwest Airlines pilot aborted a landing at Hollywood Burbank Airport on February 22, 2023, after determining the runway was not clear of departing traffic, triggering a federal investigation into what safety officials classified as a runway incursion with loss of separation. The incident, which involved automated collision-avoidance alerts firing in the cockpit, fits a pattern of close calls at U.S. airports that has drawn sharp scrutiny from investigators and raised hard questions about whether air traffic control systems can keep pace with the volume of flights they manage.
What Happened at Burbank
The event unfolded when a Mesa Airlines CRJ900 was inbound to Hollywood Burbank Airport while a SkyWest EMB-170/175 was departing on the same runway. The two aircraft came close enough that their onboard Traffic Collision Avoidance Systems, known as TCAS, issued resolution advisories to both flight crews. A TCAS resolution advisory is the system’s most urgent command, directing pilots to climb or descend immediately to avoid a collision. The fact that both aircraft received these alerts signals that standard separation between them had broken down.
The National Transportation Safety Board opened an investigation and later issued a preliminary report covering this event alongside a second runway incursion at a different airport. The NTSB classified the Burbank case as involving both a runway incursion and a loss of separation, two distinct safety failures that, when combined, represent one of the most dangerous scenarios in commercial aviation. No injuries were reported, but the margin for error in these situations is razor-thin.
What remains unclear from the preliminary findings is the precise distance between the two aircraft at their closest point. The NTSB has not yet released final separation figures for the Burbank event. No direct ATC audio from the incident has been made publicly available, and Southwest Airlines has not issued a public statement specific to this event. Those gaps matter because they limit the ability to assess exactly how close the aircraft came to contact and what specific communication failures, if any, contributed to the breakdown.
A Pattern of Near-Misses Across U.S. Airports
The Burbank incident did not happen in isolation. A strikingly similar event played out in Chicago, where a Southwest Airlines flight performed a precautionary go-around after another aircraft entered the runway during the approach. Airport webcam video and ATC audio captured the sequence. Southwest confirmed that its crew executed the go-around because another aircraft had entered the runway, a scenario nearly identical to what the Burbank pilot faced.
A separate close call in San Diego added another data point. In that case, NTSB investigators determined that a blocked radio transmission prevented a pilot from receiving a critical instruction, leading to two aircraft converging on the same runway. LiveATC audio from the event captured a pilot asking on frequency whether there was an aircraft on the runway, a question that should never need to be asked if communication channels are functioning properly. The blocked transmission meant that one crew simply never heard the warning that would have kept them clear.
Taken together, these three events expose a recurring vulnerability: the gap between what controllers transmit and what pilots actually receive. In Burbank, the pilot caught the conflict visually or through TCAS. In Chicago, the crew spotted the intruding aircraft in time to abort. In San Diego, a blocked frequency nearly erased the last line of defense. Each outcome depended on a backup system or human judgment compensating for a primary failure.
Why Communication Breakdowns Keep Happening
Most coverage of runway incursions treats each event as an isolated lapse. That framing misses the structural problem. U.S. airports rely on voice-based radio communication between controllers and pilots, a system that has not fundamentally changed in decades. When two pilots transmit at the same time, their signals cancel each other out, producing the “blocked transmission” that NTSB investigators identified as the cause of the San Diego near-miss. This is not a rare glitch. It is a known limitation of the technology, and it becomes more likely as traffic density increases.
Hollywood Burbank Airport handles a mix of regional carriers operating smaller jets alongside Southwest’s Boeing 737 fleet. Airports with this kind of mixed-fleet traffic face tighter sequencing demands because aircraft types have different approach speeds, takeoff roll distances, and climb rates. A CRJ900 and an EMB-170/175 do not accelerate or clear a runway at the same rate as larger narrowbodies, which means controllers must thread tighter timing windows when sequencing departures and arrivals on shared runways.
The post-pandemic rebound in air travel has compressed those windows further. Airlines restored capacity aggressively, and passenger volumes at many airports returned to or exceeded pre-pandemic levels. But the infrastructure and staffing that manage that traffic did not scale at the same pace. Controller fatigue and staffing shortages have been recurring concerns raised in broader safety discussions, though specific staffing data for Burbank at the time of this incident has not been released. When a small team manages a dense arrival and departure bank, the risk that one instruction will be misheard, blocked, or misinterpreted rises.
Compounding that risk is the physical layout of some airports. Burbank’s single main runway must accommodate both arrivals and departures in rapid sequence, leaving little slack if a departing aircraft is slow to roll or an inbound jet reaches minimums faster than expected. In such environments, even minor delays or hesitations in communication can force pilots into split-second decisions about whether to continue or abort a landing.
What TCAS Saves and What It Cannot
TCAS resolution advisories worked as designed in the Burbank event, giving both crews automated escape instructions when separation collapsed. The system has prevented midair collisions since its mandatory installation in the early 1990s, and it remains one of the most effective last-resort safety tools in aviation. But TCAS was never intended to be a routine traffic management tool. It exists to catch failures that should not happen in the first place.
When TCAS fires during a normal arrival or departure sequence, it means every prior layer of protection has already failed. The controller either did not see the conflict, did not communicate it in time, or the communication did not reach the crew. Relying on TCAS as a de facto safety net normalizes a level of risk that the system was built to prevent, not absorb on a recurring basis.
The distinction matters for passengers. A go-around is safe when executed correctly, but it adds workload to a flight crew during one of the most task-saturated phases of flight. Repeated go-arounds, or approaches flown with the expectation that TCAS will intervene if something goes wrong, erode the safety buffer that has made commercial aviation extraordinarily safe over the long term. Every time an airliner must abandon a landing because another aircraft is still on the runway, it is a sign that the system is running closer to its limits than it should.
Rebuilding the Safety Margin
The Burbank incident and its counterparts in Chicago and San Diego underscore that the United States is relying heavily on human vigilance and last-ditch automation to compensate for aging communication tools and crowded airspace. Fixing that imbalance will require more than reminders and memos about “situational awareness.” It will demand investment and structural change.
One obvious step is modernizing controller–pilot communication. Data link systems that send clearances and instructions as text directly to cockpit displays can coexist with voice, reducing the chance that a critical message is blocked or stepped on. Some long-haul and oceanic routes already use such tools; expanding them to busy terminal areas would be complex but not impossible. Even incremental changes, such as better alerting when transmissions overlap, could give controllers a way to know when a key instruction may not have been heard.
Airports can also redesign procedures to build in more margin. That might mean wider gaps between arriving and departing aircraft on single-runway operations, or stricter rules about when a departure can be cleared once an arrival has passed a certain point on final. These changes could lengthen queues and add delays, but they would make it less likely that a pilot on short final has to question whether the runway is actually clear.
Staffing and training are another pressure point. Ensuring that tower controllers have enough rest, adequate backup on position, and realistic traffic levels during peak periods directly affects their ability to catch and correct conflicts before they reach the point of a TCAS alert. For pilots, recurrent training that emphasizes go-around decision-making and assertive use of TCAS guidance can help ensure that when the system does intervene, crews respond immediately and consistently.
Ultimately, the aborted landing at Burbank is not just a story about one Southwest flight that broke off an approach on a February evening. It is a warning about the narrowing gap between routine operations and the edge of the safety envelope. As long as controllers and pilots must rely on decades-old radio technology to choreograph dense traffic on shared runways, close calls like Burbank, Chicago, and San Diego will continue to surface. The question for regulators, airlines, and passengers is whether those warnings will spur the kind of systemic upgrades that restore a wider margin—or whether the industry will continue to count on quick reactions and last-resort automation to keep disaster at bay.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
