A US military aircraft nearly collided with a JetBlue plane near Venezuela after entering the passenger jet’s flight path without its transponder on, according to air traffic control recordings.
The JetBlue plane took off from the Dutch Caribbean island of Curaçao, which is about 40 miles off the coast of Venezuela, a popular tourist destination, and was en route to John F. Kennedy Airport in New York.
“We almost had a midair collision up here,” the JetBlue pilot said in the recording. “They passed directly in our flight path. … They don’t have their transponder turned on, it’s outrageous.”
The pilot identified the aircraft as a US Air Force refueling tanker and told air traffic control that he had to stop the plane’s climb. “We just had traffic pass directly in front of us within 5 miles of us — maybe 2 or 3 miles — but it was an air-to-air refueler from the United States Air Force and he was at our altitude. We had to stop our climb,” the pilot said.
Air traffic control responded by saying, “It has been outrageous with the unidentified aircraft within our air.”
The US began military flights near Venezuela’s coast amid its bombing campaign against alleged drug-running boats in the region and its threats of launching a war with Venezuela to oust Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. One recent flight involved US Navy F/A-18 fighter jets flying deep into the Gulf of Venezuela.
According to The New York Times, on Saturday, a day after the near-collision, air traffic controllers in Curaçao told three pilots to be aware of unidentified aircraft flying in the area, an apparent reference to planes not using transponders that were likely US military aircraft.