Runway incursions at U.S. airports are making headlines in 2025, but these types of incidents are actually happening less often than in the past.
Runway near-misses make for anxiety-fueled headlines, but they are not up compared to recent years.
A recent report involves an American Airlines flight arriving at Ronald Reagan National Airport, which was said to have “suddenly canceled its landing” to avoid another aircraft Tuesday, according to The New York Times.
But American Airlines pushed back on this assessment, telling Forbes via email that the plane “landed safely and normally at DCA after it was instructed by Air Traffic Control to complete a standard go-around to allow another aircraft more time for takeoff,” adding “a go-around is not an abnormal flight maneuver and can occur nearly every day in the National Airspace System.”
Meanwhile the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is investigating a near-miss after a Southwest Airlines jet “initiated a go-around when a business jet entered the runway without authorization” at Chicago Midway Airport on Tuesday.
Multiple redundancies are in place to ensure that if one safety measure fails, another will take over, aviation safety expert and retired commercial airline pilot Capt. John Cox told Forbes.
“For example, the Southwest crew rightfully realized that the [Flexjet pilot] was not going to stop, and at that point they had not touched down yet, so they followed the standard and did a go-around, which is something pilots train for,” Cox said.
There were 1,474 runway incursions—defined as incidents “involving the incorrect presence of an aircraft, vehicle, or person” on a runway—in the United States in 2024, averaging four per day, according to a FAA database. This was down 17% from 2023, when 1,777 runway incursions were tallied, averaging five per day, per the FAA. The vast majority of these incidents happen in the general aviation space, involving private and corporate flights, and do not involve commercial passenger jets. The FAA database does not yet include 2025 incidents. But so far in 2025, in addition to the events at Reagan National and Chicago Midway, the agency’s accidents and incidents page lists two incidents where commercial airline planes were clipped while taxiing in areas not under air traffic control and one incident where a deicing vehicle struck a commercial passenger jet on the deicing pad.
In March 2023, the FAA assessed “a cluster” of runway near-misses, including three incursions in January that year that had “significant potential for collision.” In August 2023, the FAA awarded more than $121 million to airports across the country to be put toward projects that reduced the risk of runway incursions, such as reconfigured taxiways, new lighting systems and providing additional flexibility on the airfield.
“We went 16 years with no airline crashes in the U.S., and now we’ve had two in a period of months,” Cox said. “Because of the Washington midair collision and the Toronto hard landing, there is more national media attention. Those accidents mean that low-probability events can happen, but it does not mean that the aviation system is degraded in safety.”
About 400 FAA employees were recently laid off as part of President Donald Trump’s widespread effort to slim down the federal government, though air traffic controllers were exempt from the layoffs. “We protected roles that are critical to safety,” Department of Transportation spokesperson Halee Dobbins told the Associated Press last week. “These were probationary employees—meaning they had only been at the FAA for less than two years, represented less than 1% of FAA’s more than 45,000 employees.”
Here’s Where Trump’s Government Layoffs Are—Highway Safety, FEMA, TSA And More (Forbes)