On early Saturday morning, a Fedex 767 was coming into land at the airport in Austin through thick low clouds and fog. The controller cleared the plane to land and when it was three miles out from landing, they then told the Southwest flight to take off from the same runway. The two planes got within a few hundred feet of killing everyone onboard both planes. It was only the careful flying by the Fedex crew that saved everyone. Here's a video of the incident with the actual radio traffic between the tower and the two planes. Article. Second more detailed video.
Here's where it gets interesting. Apparently this particular controller is known to be incompetent but files EEO complaints and gets shuffled around instead of being fired. Over on the ATC subreddit, one controller had this to say:
This is the problem right here. You have a controller who, according to everyone who has worked with him from the last facility where he washed out and now AUS, say has no business being a controller and they can't fire him because he files EEO complaints habitually. And yet you have people trying to push another agenda entirely with the 6 day work weeks and fatigue, which this event has nothing to do with. Just call it what it is. A shitty controller who has no business being a controller just tried to kill a lot of people, and the FAA and NATCA will do NOTHING about it.
Source. For those who don't know, EEO complaints are a way for employees to complain that they are being discriminated against under federal law. So this guy, who sounds like he's black judging from his voice, uses the shield of federal discrimination laws to avoid being fired for incompetence. And true to form, the federal government just shuffles him off to a different airport to be some else's problem.
I'm not a pilot but from reading the other ATC comments, the minimum spacing is 2 mi. At the 767's closing speed, the 737 had about 30 seconds to begin its takeoff once the clearance was given. In ideal conditions, it would have been possible since the Southwest crew told the controller that they were ready for takeoff. But clearly this ATC should have accounted for less than idea conditions, especially since that morning the fog was thick enough that the tower couldn't even see the 737 on the ground. This stunt by the ATC was completely unnecessary since there was no traffic behind the Fedex and I've read nothing to indicate that the Southwest flight was in any sort of time crunch.
Yeah, they were the real heros in all this. They were clearly paying attention to the radio traffic and stayed cognizant of what was happening on the ground in front of them. People are also speculating that the cockpit FLIR that these Fedex freighters have gave the crew extra situational awareness that helped out in this case.
Yeah I saw another video about it and realized how much worse it was than I thought. That was really close to a huge fireball.