Southwest safety incidents

Two Southwest Airlines flights came within about 500 feet of each other near Nashville on April 18 after one crew aborted a landing and another jet was taking off. The Federal Aviation Administration said it is investigating. (cbsnews.com) The arriving plane, Southwest Flight 507 from Myrtle Beach, went around at about 5:30 p.m. local time in gusty winds near Nashville International Airport. Air traffic control then instructed it into the path of Southwest Flight 1152, a Boeing 737 departing for Knoxville from a parallel runway, according to the Federal Aviation Administration and CBS News. (abcnews.go.com) (cbsnews.com) Both cockpits received Traffic Collision Avoidance System warnings, the onboard alarm that tells pilots when another aircraft is too close and can order opposite vertical moves to open space between them. Southwest said Flight 507 later landed normally in Nashville and Flight 1152 continued to Knoxville. (cbsnews.com) (faa.gov) The near miss landed in a system already under scrutiny after a string of close calls at U.S. airports and the January 29, 2025 collision between an American Airlines regional jet and an Army Black Hawk near Washington, D.C., that killed 67 people. Federal investigators and regulators have spent the past year pressing airports and controllers to reduce separation errors and runway conflicts. (abcnews.go.com) (oig.dot.gov) The Federal Aviation Administration defines the most serious runway-incursion cases as Category A incidents, where a collision was narrowly avoided. A go-around itself is routine, but the danger in Nashville came after the turn instruction put one Southwest jet into another jet’s departure path. (faa.gov) (cbsnews.com) A second Southwest event in California also drew attention last week, when Flight 1016 from Hollywood Burbank to Santa Rosa diverted and landed in Oakland instead of continuing to Charles M. Schulz Sonoma County Airport. Southwest began serving Santa Rosa on April 7, 2026, making the diversion part of the airline’s first weeks on that route. (travelandtourworld.com) (swamedia.com) Public reporting on the Oakland diversion has been thinner than on Nashville, and Southwest’s public flight-status page does not provide a detailed cause in the search results reviewed Tuesday. Flight-tracking pages showed Flight 1016 scheduled on the Burbank-Santa Rosa route in mid-April, but those databases are not official accident findings. (southwest.com) (flightradar24.com) Southwest has said safety is its top priority, and the Nashville case also points back to air traffic control, not just airline operations. The Federal Aviation Administration’s next steps are likely to focus on controller instructions, radar data, cockpit alerts and whether local procedures at Nashville need to change. (abcnews.go.com) (cbsnews.com)