The Federal Aviation Administration said on Thursday that it was investigating after a helicopter flew in front of a commercial plane in California.
The near miss came several days after the agency suspended the use of visual separation between airplanes and helicopters near busy airports.
United Airlines Flight 589 was approaching John Wayne Airport in Orange County, Calif., on Tuesday around 8:40 p.m. when a Sikorsky Black Hawk helicopter crossed its path, the F.A.A. said in a statement. The agency said it was looking into whether visual separation was used during the incident.
Last week, the F.A.A. began requiring air traffic controllers to actively manage the flight paths taken by helicopters and commercial planes around busy airports. The announcement ended a common practice known as visual separation, which allows the pilots of helicopters and smaller planes to manage their own way through crowded skies. It reduced the workload of tightly staffed control towers but forced pilots to rely only on what they could see to avoid collisions.
The suspension came more than a year after an Army Black Hawk helicopter crashed into American Airlines Flight 5342 near Reagan National Airport in Washington, killing all 67 people aboard both aircraft. The pilots of the helicopter had been granted permission to use visual separation minutes before the collision.
The helicopter involved in the incident on Tuesday was a U.S. Army aircraft, according to Flightradar24, which tracks flight paths.
The Army did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In a statement, United Airlines said that air traffic controllers had advised the pilots on Flight 589 to watch for a military helicopter flying near the airport. The pilots saw the helicopter and received a traffic alert, then responded by leveling the aircraft instead of continuing its descent, the statement said.
The plane, which was carrying 162 passengers and six crew members, landed safely, the airline said.
The incident came in the same week that an airport fire truck drove across the runway as Air Canada Express Flight 8646 was landing at LaGuardia Airport in New York late Sunday. A preliminary investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board found that overlapping staffing and technology failures had caused the collision, which killed both pilots of the plane.
Francesca Regalado is a Times reporter covering breaking news.
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