Whats behind the alarming rise in near-collisions of commercial airplanes

Miles O’Brien:

Well, there's a bubble around every aircraft, Geoff, and it depends. The bubble's size varies depending on where that aircraft happens to be.

It can be a number of miles at altitude, but as you get closer and closer to the airport, it shrinks. And so it can be anywhere between 3,000 and 6,000 feet distance between two aircraft that are arriving and departing at an airport.

And any time you get inside that bubble, that's technically considered an incursion and something that should be reported. Now, there are degrees of severity within that. You can imagine something within 6,000 feet, which is more than a mile.

If it's just inside that bubble, might not be that big a deal, but if it gets a lot more close than that, the attention level goes up, as it should.

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