Air Force Grounds Fighter-Plane Flights Second Close Call On Friday; Earlier Chase Was Deliberate

An F-16 fighter pilot continued to chase a charter plane about 70 miles south of New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport on Wednesday, coming frighteningly close even after being told it was a civilian aircraft, a source close to the investigation said Friday.

Even as the Pentagon tried to sort out exactly what happened, the Air Force announced it had suspended East Coast Reserve and National Guard training flights after a second incident involving a civilian jet and military aircraft was reported Friday.

The government source, who offered a minute-by-minute account of Wednesday’s encounter between two F-16s and a Nations Air Boeing 727, stopped short of accusing the fighter pilot of playing “Top Gun.”

But he said investigators are likely to ask why the military pilot continued to close in on the airliner for up to two and a half minutes after learning it was a civilian jet.

Meanwhile, Pentagon officials called a news conference Friday night to announce the second incident, involving four F-16 fighter jets and an American Eagle flight off the coast of Maryland. That incident occurred about 10 to 15 miles offshore, as the four fighter planes were returning from a training mission.

Federal Aviation Administration officials said the pilot of the American Eagle plane, flying from Raleigh, N.C., to New York, reported that the military jets came too close, though an Air National Guard official said the American Eagle was never in danger.

In the first incident, two F-16s from the Air National Guard’s 177th fighter wing, based in Atlantic City, N.J., were taking turns intercepting each other as part of a training mission, Air National Guard officials said.

When they saw the 727 on their radar screens, one of the military pilots broke away to get a closer look. The commercial plane, flying at 28,000 feet, was carrying 84 people on a charter flight from San Juan, Puerto Rico, to New York City.

Civilian and military air traffic controllers, working from separate control centers on the ground, had given the charter plane and the fighter planes permission to be in the same area.

About 30 seconds past 1:42 p.m., the source said, civilian and military air controllers noticed that the F-16 was closing in on the charter airplane, and the military controller radioed the F-16 pilot to remind him of the 727’s presence. The F-16 pilot acknowledged the transmission and said he could see the 727 on his radar, the source said.

Instead of breaking away, however, the F-16 pilot continued approaching the 727 for two to three minutes, finally getting within 1,000 feet of the plane and causing the commercial aircraft’s collision avoidance alarm to go off, the source said.

The airliner dived 9,000 feet in an evasive action. The fighter pilot turned away only after receiving a second transmission from the military air traffic controller, instructing him to move away from the commercial plane, the source said.