Two fully loaded passenger jets came within about a mile of each other in the early hours of Saturday, 7 November, shortly after leaving Los Angeles International Airport on parallel runways. The aircraft involved were an Air France A350 bound for Papeete in French Polynesia and an American Airlines A321 heading to Dallas-Fort Worth. Both departed around 12:20 am local time.
According to the Federal Aviation Administration, the trouble started when the Air France aircraft made a turn it was not cleared for moments after take-off, cutting across the flight path of the American Airlines plane. Controllers moved fast: they issued corrective headings to the Air France crew and warned the American Airlines pilots that traffic was less than a mile away, telling them to hold at 2,000 feet while the situation was sorted out.
Recordings of the control-room chatter, which circulated on social media within hours, capture controllers pressing the Air France pilots on why they had strayed from their assigned departure route. Asked which procedure they were flying, one pilot asked for a moment before confirming the crew had been told to follow the SUMMR TWO departure — a standard pre-planned routing for aircraft leaving LAX. The exchange underlines how quickly a routine departure can turn into a coordination exercise between two crews and a controller.
There was a calm ending. Air France said its crew was instructed by air traffic control to adjust course shortly after departure and complied straight away. The A350 carried on across the Pacific and touched down in Papeete at 5:59 am local time, with no injuries reported on either aircraft. The FAA confirmed controllers had intervened immediately once the Air France plane entered the American Airlines flight's path.
For travellers, the takeaway is reassuring rather than alarming. Close calls near major hubs are rare, and when they do happen the system — controllers, standard departure procedures, quick crew compliance — is designed to catch them before anything happens. The incident will likely feed into the FAA's routine review of the event, but neither airline has grounded routes or changed schedules as a result. If you are flying out of LAX overnight or connecting through it, there is no practical reason to adjust plans; the more useful note is simply that departure procedures like SUMMR TWO exist precisely so aircraft leaving parallel runways stay separated.
The story was reported by Getaway South Africa, drawing on People Magazine, with detail from FAA statements and air traffic control recordings.
