American Airlines flight 2482 was attempting to land from Chicago very early on Friday at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport. At the same time, to the dismay of an air traffic controller, another American Airlines flight — also with the call sign 2482 — was departing.
The controller quickly realized the overlap and began to identify the planes as American 2482 “departure” and American 2482 “arrival,” according to a recording of the air traffic dispatch.
He managed to keep the two aircraft properly separated, and the planes touched down and took off without incident.
“I’ve been working air traffic for 25 years — I’ve never seen two aircraft pretty much emerge with the same call sign,” the controller said on the recording. “I’m glad it all worked out there. It could have been disastrous.”
The Federal Aviation Administration is investigating, the agency said in a statement.
An American Airlines spokeswoman said that the arriving flight had been delayed.
A different aircraft at the airport was given the same call sign to take the place of the delayed flight, which was scheduled to take passengers to Chicago after it landed.
However, the delayed flight ended up arriving at the same time that its replacement — now bearing the same call sign — was taking off. How that came to pass was not immediately known.
The airline was “reviewing the details related to two American flights with the same call sign,” the company said in a statement.
“Both flights continued safely and without incident,” the statement added.
A call sign is a set of alphanumeric characters used to identify an aircraft in communications on the ground. In this case, the sign was the public flight number that identified the plane.
If an overlap is undetected, one pilot might respond to a directive from the control tower intended for the other plane.
What happened in Phoenix was “very serious,” said John Cox, a former airline pilot who runs an aviation safety consulting firm. “It’s a process failure. My question is, How did it happen?”
Mr. Cox added that, in his decades as a commercial pilot, he had never seen two planes sharing a call sign in the same vicinity.
A collision was unlikely because of warning systems and training, he said, but the confusion pointed to at least a momentary glaring gap in procedure.
“The investigators are going to look at how the process failed, and that’s really of greater interest to me than the single event in Phoenix,” Mr. Cox said. “There is such a robust process, so that’s the thing I want to know: Where was the process breakdown?”
There have been recent reports about near misses between planes at major airports in the United States.
In June, the F.A.A. said it was investigating a Delta Air Lines flight that had to avoid another plane that was taking off from an intersecting runway at Boston Logan International Airport. In April, there was a near miss between two planes at Kennedy International Airport.
In 2023, a New York Times investigation found that there were at least 46 close calls involving commercial airlines in July that year.
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