A veteran New Jersey air traffic controller has revealed he was forced to scribble handwritten flight details in a notebook amid fears his radar equipment would go dark as he was trying to avoid a recent nose-to-nose midair collision.
Jonathan Stewart 45, was working at the Philadelphia facility that oversees airspace near the troubled Newark Liberty International Airport on May 4 when the near-miss unfolded, the Wall Street Journal reported.
“I don’t want to be responsible for killing 400 people,” Stewart said in a lengthy interview — as he detailed the frightening ordeal that resulted in him taking stress leave.
He said he took the dramatic step of scribbling down callsigns for the two planes given radar systems at the facility had failed just days earlier — wreaking havoc at the major international hub.
The mid-air saga involved a business jet that had just taken off from the Morristown Airport and a small jet that was coming from nearby Teterboro Airport.
“I had been working in the operation for roughly three hours-ish at the time of the incident. Typically, I try not to work myself or anyone else longer than two hours. It has just been my experience that after that two hour marks, your mental acuity begins to diminish a little bit because it’s fatigue,” he said.
“In my situation, I was getting tired. I was having to utilize a combination of radar and non-radar rules that I basically just made up on the fly to separate aircraft in such a way that I could be prepared for losing radar.”
He added, “That increased my workload that led to me having a close call — so a nose-to-nose situation.”
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