Two planes have collided while taxiing at Miami International Airport, with audio revealing the moment one of the pilots had to tell air traffic control of the mishap.
According to audio published on ATC, a UPS flight collided with a Copa Airlines flight that had just touched down in the Florida city on Saturday night.
The flight, according to Flightaware, had just touched down after arriving in from Panama City when it was struck.
‘Somebody hit us,’ the pilot said as an air traffic controller then responded: ‘UPS 358, you’re supposed to give way to the 73 there.’
After a short back and forth, which is largely unintelligible, the controller asked: ‘UPS 358 did you hit that aircraft?’
The pilot responded: ‘Yeah we went too far and he clipped us with his wing,’ he eventually said.
According to Fox Sports journalist Andy Slater, who posted to X about the incident, the nose of one plane collided with the wing tip of the other.
Slater added that two people onboard the Copa flight had already complained of back pain. A fire department source told Slater the incident was minor.
Officials have since told the Daily Mail that nobody was injured on either planes and that the collision did not impact airport operations.
Two planes have collided while taxiing at Miami International Airport, leaving this jet with a damaged nose
The flight, according to Flightaware, had just touched down after arriving in from Panama City when it was struck
According to air traffic control chatter the incident involved a UPS flight, a stock image of one is seen here
In a statement to the Daily Mail, a spokesperson for the airport said: ‘At approximately 9:15 p.m., an arriving aircraft and a departing aircraft made contact with each other at the intersection of two taxiways.
‘There are no reported injuries and flights are being directed to other taxiways, so there is no impact to airport operations at this time.’
The Daily Mail has approached UPS as well as Miami-Dade Fire and Rescue for further comment.
It comes after a catastrophic day on Friday and Saturday across the nation as a ground stop was ordered across the country on Friday.
There were 50,000 flights scheduled across the US when the ground stop occurred , and 30,000 have now been completed said.
Of the 40,000 flights scheduled on Saturday, officials said about 4,000-5,000 will likely be canceled.
The flight halt was the first since January 11, 2023, after a key Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) computer system malfunctioned, and just the second since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
At a press conference on Saturday, Department of Transportation Chief Sean Duffy blamed archaic equipment found in a ‘remote location’ as the preliminary cause.
According to audio published on ATC, a UPS flight collided with a Copa Airlines flight that had just touched down in the Florida city on Saturday night. The airport is seen here in an image from Friday
It comes after a catastrophic day on Friday and Saturday across the nation as a ground stop was ordered across the country on Friday
Americans faced the longest aviation stoppage since 9/11 on Friday after an extremely rare ground stop was issued, stranding about 1.5 million passengers
He told reporters that a contractor, L3Harris, was replacing old technology at a ‘remote location’ when the air traffic control communications issue began.
Duffy said that a contractor was doing maintenance at least one of four remote FAA locations and was switching lines from old copper wire to fiber before communications stalled.
He called L3Harris the department’s ‘legacy provider,’ accusing the contractor of failing to ‘meet the moment,’ causing the outage.
‘What we’re working to determine was whether we had incompetence – meaning, was it user error or installation error from L3Harris — or did they install a faulty router? We haven’t determined what the fault was. Was it the router? Or were they not doing great work for us at L3Harris?’ he continued.
Duffy said the wire being replaced was so old it was being discontinued, prompting the routine maintenance.
He explained that as the wire was being replaced from copper to fiber, it flooded other routers and disrupted the radar feeds, making it difficult for air traffic control to communicate.
Duffy reiterated that officials do not believe the incident resulted from a cyberattack. He added that once the issue was detected at the FAA’s remote location, communications came back.
L3Harris is a technology distributor that has contracts with multiple US agencies. Earlier this year, the company announced a proposed partnership with the Department of War to manufacture rocket motors that power US and allied missiles.
The company told the Daily Mail in a statement that they have been ‘modernizing the communications infrastructure supporting the National Airspace System in close coordination with the FAA.
