A UPS cargo plane and a Copa Airlines passenger jet collided on a taxiway at Miami International Airport. The collision happened just one day after the nationwide ground stop that disrupted thousands of flights across the US.
A UPS cargo plane and a passenger jet collided at Miami International Airport on Saturday night, just one day after a nationwide ground stop threw US air travel into chaos.
The crash happened at around 9:15 p.m. when a Copa Airlines jet that had just arrived from Panama City and a UPS cargo plane headed for Bogota, Colombia, made contact where two taxiways meet.
Moments later, the Copa pilot came on the radio with a short message: “Somebody hit us.”
What the pilots said on the radio
Air traffic control then turned to the crew of UPS Flight 358. “UPS 358, did you hit that aircraft?” the controller asked, according to air traffic control audio.
The UPS pilot admitted it. “Yeah, we went too far, and he clipped us with his wing,” he replied.
Greg Chin, communications director for Miami International Airport, told The New York Post that two people had been hurt and were treated at the scene by Miami-Dade Fire Rescue for minor injuries and didn’t need to go to the hospital.
He added that flights were being sent to other taxiways, so there was “no impact to airport operations at this time.”
A tough weekend for US air travel
The collision happened less than 24 hours after the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) halted departures across the country because of a communications failure in the air traffic control system.
According to the Wall Street Journal, more than 13,000 flights were delayed or canceled and more than 3,500 planes were in the air when the trouble started on Friday afternoon.
Officials said the FAA never fully lost radar or communications, but the systems were unstable enough to ground flights nationwide. There is no confirmed link between the Miami collision and Friday’s outage however.
The ground stop on Friday lasted roughly four hours. “So at 8:15 tonight, Eastern Time, we’ve opened up the airspace,” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said. “But it’s going to take us some time to unwind what happened this afternoon.”
What caused the outage
At a White House briefing on Friday evening, Duffy blamed overloaded equipment in the FAA’s aging network. “Our (network) switches, our routers, actually got overloaded with data,” he said. “They started to give us inconsistency in the data from those routers. And because of that, we shut the system down.”
He also pointed to how old parts of the system are. “We use 1980s little copper lines,” he said.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin suggested new equipment being installed had overwhelmed the older system. “The patchwork doesn’t work. We need one complete system,” he said.
Duffy has called the situation a national emergency. He wants Congress to approve an extra $50 billion, on top of the $12.5 billion already secured through the One Big Beautiful Bill, to build a completely new system. In the meantime, he warned that airlines could see delays and cancellations for several more days.
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