JetBlue JetBlue A320 Comes Within A Few Miles of U.S. Air Force Tanker in Caribbean Airspace. With audio.
A JetBlue Airbus A320 en route from Willemstad, Curaçao, to New York JFK narrowly avoided a collision with a U.S. Air Force tanker aircraft on 12 December.
This emerges from a report by the Dutch news outlet NOS. Flight data from Flightradar24 shows that the aircraft, registered N809JB, stopped climbing approximately 28 minutes after departure from Curaçao.
Audio recordings of the communication between the JetBlue crew and air traffic control reveal that the pilots observed a U.S. Air Force aircraft at a distance of two to three miles. The tanker was flying about 700 feet above the Airbus and was operating at the altitude that had been assigned to the JetBlue flight by air traffic control.
Listen to the audio here.
According to the crew, the tanker aircraft did not have its transponder switched on. “It is outrageous,” one of the pilots can be heard saying. The air traffic controller responded that he also did not see the tanker on radar.
“We almost had a mid-air collision,” the JetBlue pilot said.
One day later an American Airlines aircraft was warned by Air Traffic Control about an unidentified aircraft which was close to the American Airlines aircraft. ATC recording here.
