Trumps suggests suspending license of jet pilot involved in Midway Airport near-miss

CHICAGO - President Donald Trump praised the Southwest pilots who narrowly avoided a collision with a jet on the runway while landing Tuesday morning at Midway Airport.

Trump took to TruthSocial on Wednesday to weigh in on the latest plane scare. The post read:

"GREAT JOB BY THE SOUTHWEST PILOTS IN CHICAGO. A NEARLY TRAGIC CLOSE CALL. PERHAPS SUSPEND THE PILOTS LICENSE OF THE OTHER PLANE, WHO MUST HAVE BEEN "SLEEPING!"

On Tuesday, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said the Flexjet crew may have their licenses revoked.

Disaster averted at Midway Airport

The backstory:

The near-collision happened just before 9 a.m. when a Flexjet crossed the runway where a Southwest plane, flight 2504, was coming in for landing. The Southwest craft had already touched down, but pilots observed the Flexjet and quickly took off once again to avoid a collision.

Video of the incident posted on X by the account Flight Emergency showed the tense moments as the aircrafts narrowly dodged each other.

Southwest Flight 2504 safely landed "after the crew performed a precautionary go-around to avoid a possible conflict with another aircraft that entered the runway," an airline spokesperson said in an email. "The crew followed safety procedures and the flight landed without incident."

NTSB chair says crew "failed"

What they're saying:

National Transportation Safety Board chair Jennifer Homendy told Fox & Friends Wednesday morning that the near-miss was a failure of the private jet crew to listen to air traffic control instructions.

Homendy said the Flexjet crew had been instructed to "line up and wait and hold short of runway 31C, which Southwest was landing on, and they failed to do so."

Homendy noted, however, that the NTSB still has to conduct its investigation before coming to any final conclusions or taking any punitive action against the Flexjet crew.

"There's a lot of information we still have to collect. We want to know what was going on in the cockpit of that airplane," Homendy said. "We will collect air traffic control communications. We have asked for the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder from Flexjet."

Recent plane disasters prompting concern

Big picture view:

The past few weeks have seen four major aviation disasters in North America. They include the Feb. 6 crash of a commuter plane in Alaska that killed all 10 people on board and the Jan. 26 midair collision between an Army helicopter and an American Airlines flight at Washington’s Ronald Reagan National Airport that killed all 67 aboard the two aircraft.

A medical transport jet with a child patient, her mother and four others aboard crashed Jan. 31 into a Philadelphia neighborhood. That crash killed seven people, including all those aboard, and injured 19 others.

Twenty-one people were injured Feb. 17 when a Delta flight flipped and landed on its roof at Toronto’s Pearson Airport.