excerpts from today's Boston Globe:
Two air-traffic controllers involved in a near-collision of two passenger jets at Logan International Airport this month are being retrained and will not direct takeoffs and landings until they have been recertified, the Federal Aviation Administration said yesterday.
FAA spokesman Jim Peters said yesterday that after controllers witnessed the near-collision from the tower, a supervisor immediately relieved the two employees who were responsible for directing departures and arrivals.
''The two controllers in this incident were decertified and are undergoing retraining as part of this investigation," Peters said. ''They are allowed to work certain positions in the facility until their refresher training is completed. They will not be allowed to work what we call the 'local control' position at the tower."
When a plane is ready to leave the gate and begin its trip, the pilot must clear his intended flight path with one controller. Then before entering the taxiway, he must obtain clearance from a second controller, who guides the plane to the runway for take off.
A third controller, in the position called local control, then clears the plane to take off and watches as other aircraft land.
Logan's tower operates with two sets of these controllers, one for the east side and one for the west side. They are supposed to ensure that planes on intersecting runways do not approach each other. That night, one controller was in charge of the Aer Lingus jet and another was monitoring the US Airways plane.
Electronic snapshots taken of the event by Logan's ground radar system and obtained by the Globe yesterday indicate the two planes came closer than the 200 feet to 1,000 feet described previously by sources familiar with the incident.
Information from the Airport Movement Area Safety System, which captures radar images of planes on the runways and taxiways every second, describes the US Airways jet coming within 171 feet of the runway intersection where the Aer Lingus plane was taking off. The images suggest both planes were still on the ground, though officials have said the Aer Lingus plane had just lifted off.
According to the radar data, which Peters did not dispute, the US Airways plane was traveling 167 miles per hour as the Aer Lingus jet passed directly in front of it at 198 miles per hour.
Peters said the FAA turned over the radar snapshots and other records to the NTSB, whose investigation includes examining their accuracy before a final determination is made on how close the planes came to each other and who was at fault.
Spokesmen for both airlines and for the Massachusetts Port Authority, which operates Logan, declined to comment yesterday, saying they are waiting for the safety board's conclusions.
The safety board has conducted an initial investigation and is expected to soon release a preliminary report. .....
The FAA, however, doesn't wait for the NTSB's analysis before taking action.
''If it's warranted, we can decertify the controllers involved in these kind of operational errors," Peters said. ''They undergo retraining in specific areas found to be contributing factors that led to this operational error."
The retraining is expected to take 15 work days, he said, at which point supervisors will decide whether to recertify the two controllers.
By my crude math, at the US Airways acceleration speed, they missed by about 1.5 seconds.