The Near Miss With a Runaway Van at Pearson Airport

Last night’s incident at Accordion City’s Pearson International Airport is just a facepalm moment, but it could’ve been much, much worse. It started when a Sunwing Airlines maintenance guy stepped out of his van to service a plane but forget that he’d left the engine on and the van in gear. When he finished his work on the plane, he returned to where he’d left the van, only to find that it was gone. In the meantime, the driverless van started to move down the runway, doing a little damage to a Sunwing jet along the way and making its way toward a runway where an Air Canada flight from Edmonton was coming in for a landing.

The pilots of that jet ignored two separate commands from air traffic control to do a “go around”. Their excuse: they thought that those instructions for “someone else”. The plane missed the van — in fact, the crew never saw it — and the van was found in a patch of green past the other side of the runway, its engine still running. I get the feeling that a Sunwing mechanic is going to have to update his resume (and come up with an explanation for his job interviews) very, very soon.

Having lunch before my flight later this afternoon.

I’m sitting in the Red Rocket Diner in Pearson’s Terminal 1 as I write this (I’m on my way to Tampa), and while the near miss is hardly confidence-inspiring, it’s helpful to remember that incidents like this are rare, and when they happen, everyone — flight crews, maintenance teams, air traffic control, investigative workers — agonizes over them, works on ways to prevent such things from happening again, and makes sure that everyone who could possibly involved hears about them. When you look at the odds, the most dangerous part of flying is still the drive to the airport.