NEW YORK (CNN) -- An incident involving two airborne passenger jets on Friday has raised questions of a second possible near collision within a week at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport.


A Delta Boeing 757 similar to this crossed the path of another jetliner while aborting a landing, the FAA says.

Delta Flight 123, a Boeing 757, missed a landing approach and had to "go around," the path of Comair Flight 1520, which was taking off on a perpendicular runway, according to Federal Aviation Administration spokeswoman Laura Brown.

Brown said the two aircraft were more than a half mile away from each other and weren't at the same altitude. Air traffic controllers safely separated the two aircraft, she said.

National Air Traffic Controllers Association JFK Tower Facility representative Barrett Byrnes, however, said the two planes came within 600 feet of each other.


On Friday afternoon, the FAA ordered changes to the way takeoffs and landings on perpendicular runways are sequenced so "aircraft of one runway clear out of the path of the other runway before the second flight comes down," Brown told The Associated Press.

On Saturday night, Linea Aerea Nacional de Chile Flight 533, which was departing the airport, came close to Cayman Airways Flight 792 as it was landing, according to the National Transportation Safety Board, which is conducting an investigation.

There were conflicting reports of how close the planes were in that incident as well.

The National Air Traffic Controllers Association said that although the flights crossed paths, there was a vertical distance of 100 feet between them. The FAA said the planes were 300 vertical feet apart and half a mile apart horizontally.
CNN's Mike Ahlers, Laura Batchelor, Deborah Brunswick and Ekin Middleton contributed to this report.



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