A month after a B-52 bomber landing at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota caused a SkyWest airliner to take evasive maneuvers, the National Transportation Safety Board released its preliminary report on the incident. And, hoo boy, it was a bit more of an incident than anybody realized at first. Immediately after the B-52 nearly hit the Embraer E170, it then nearly hit a small Piper PA-28 that was also in the area! Air incidents between two planes are relatively rare, but between three of them is really something else.
This has all become yet another indicator that air traffic control in the U.S. is not in good health. Across the country, towers are understaffed by people who are overworked, in a job that has zero margin for error. The January crash of an Army Black Hawk with a regional jet happened while the ATC on duty was double-booked on both helicopter and plane duties, which very likely contributed to the horrific result.
In this instance, however, the Minot airport tower had a grand total of one operator. And it wasn’t even an FAA tower. As it turns out, this is a lot more common than you think.
The privatization of small-airport ATC
Airports have air traffic control towers, right? Well, no, actually — only around 10% of American airports have them, per AP. They’ll be at the big international airports, of course, but the huge number of smaller airfields often will be much less equipped. Many of them will only have a person with binoculars and a radio to coordinate traffic, and in case you just got confused, yes this is the year 2025. That is not ideal, particularly if there’s any, say, weather.
Still, it’s better than nothing at all, which is where things were heading a few decades ago. As an alternative to trying to operate every airport itself, starting in 1982 the FAA began a contract program with private companies to manage ATC at smaller airports. This program has been hugely successful, and private towers were managing 28% of all American air traffic in 2020. According to a USDOT report, these private towers have equivalent safety records as their FAA-run counterparts, even though they cost $1.5 million less due to less staff and lower salaries.
The Minot airport tower is such a private enterprise. That makes sense: there’s usually only 18-24 flights per day, so it’s not exactly heavily trafficked. Well, normally. On this particular day, there were three planes in the air at once, and that’s where things got weird.
Six wings, three planes, two towers, one radar
As the NTSB’s prelim report lays out, the Minot airport does have some radar coverage, but only from all the way in the other Dakota. A radar station in Rapid City, South Dakota offers service to the ATC in Minot, and an operator from the former was in touch with the latter about all three planes. The trick here is that this works for overall management, but as happened here, breaks down once you get into the nitty gritty of specific landing movements.
There is no mirrored feed of the station’s radar for the Minot operator to look at (although some small airports literally just have a live feed of a camera pointed at a nearby station’s screen), so it’s just up to verbal communication over the radio between the two towers. This got very complicated very quickly, as all three planes were talking to the ATC in Minot, who was in turn talking to the radar operator in Rapid City. This led to a big lag between a request and a response. Worse, it also led to a couple of commands going out to the wrong airplane. Oops.
It all came together in the worst way, but thankfully, the SkyWest pilot took evasive maneuvers just in time, and the B-52 didn’t strike the Piper, either. Catastrophe just barely averted.
The prelim report stops short of casting any blame, but clearly this sort of thing can’t happen again. Right now, the Big Beautiful Bill has allocated $12.5 billion to modernizing the entire system, but already USDOT is asking for $19 billion more. Even if that somehow happens, does any of that help the privately run towers, like the one at Minot?