Airport runway collisions and near-misses are happening more frequently, 22 years of data show

Jetstar Airbus A320 at Sydney Airport.

Maksym Kozlenko/Wikimedia , CC BY-NC-SA Four close calls on Sydney Airport runways in as many weeks have put air traffic management in the spotlight.

It’s too early to determine the exact cause of each one.

But four ground-safety occurrences at Australia’s busiest airport in a little over three weeks raise an obvious question: how common are occurrences like these, and are they becoming more frequent? To examine the broader pattern, I analysed Australian Transport Safety Bureau data from 2003 to 2025 for Australian commercial air transport, focusing on runway incursions (the incorrect presence of an aircraft, vehicle or person in a protected runway area) and taxiing collisions or near collisions (an aircraft colliding or nearly colliding with another aircraft, person or object while taxiing).

What happened at Sydney Airport? The most recent incident occurred just after 8am last Tuesday, when two planes were given permission to use the same runway at the same time.

Luckily, one plane stopped when its crew saw the other plane.

A little over a week earlier, on August 9, there were two more incidents in less than three hours.

At 7:20am, a Jetstar Airbus A320 preparing to depart for the Gold Coast encountered an empty Qatar Airways Boeing 777 being towed across a taxiway.

Both planes stopped abruptly.

One Jetstar cabin crew member sustained a serious injury.

Then, at about 10am, a Virgin Australia Boeing 737 bound for Perth began its take-off sequence on a runway as a Qantas 737 crossed another runway ahead.

Both crews reported having received the relevant clearance from air traffic control.

The Virgin crew stopped as air traffic control cancelled its take-off clearance.

On July 27, air traffic control cleared a Qantas Boeing 737 to cross a runway while a smaller plane was still landing.