FAA: JFK runway was smaller than required

Federal Aviation Administration records show the agency allowed the Airbus A380 double-decker jet to use a smaller taxiway at Kennedy Airport than its regulations normally require.

An A380 was involved in a crash with a regional jet Monday night at the Queens airport. More than 500 people aboard the Air France A380 and nearly 60 on the Comair regional jet escaped injury.

The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating the incident, which was captured on amateur video.

The impact caused the smaller plane to spin nearly 90 degrees.

The big jet was rolling down a taxiway and the regional jet was stopped, waiting to park at a Delta terminal gate.

NTSB investigators will no doubt examine the waiver granted to the Port Authority, which operates Kennedy Airport. FAA rules required that the hulking A380 travel on a taxiway at least 100 feet wide, but the agency allowed a taxiway 75 feet wide at the airport, according to FAA records.

Investigators also will review the amateur video that captured the left wing of the A360, the world's largest passenger plane, as it clipped the left horizontal stabilizer at the regional jet's tail.

A truck is visible passing in front of the stopped regional jet before the A380 hits it.

"We look at everything," said Keith Holloway, a spokesman for the NTSB in Washington.

The A380 has a wingspan of more than 260 feet, nearly the length of a football field.

"That's one of the things that the NTSB will be focusing on," said John M. Cox, president of Safe Operating Systems in Washington and a former US Airways pilot.

"Where is the breakdown that allowed these two planes to come together? It should have never have happened."

Ground radar, the special protocols for the A380 and a see-and-avoid instruction to pilots still couldn't prevent the crash.

Most U.S. airports can't handle either the A380 or the Boeing 787-800 due to FAA ground separation requirements.

However, the FAA can grant waivers as long as airport operators follow certain restrictions, like keeping the large jets on specific taxiways and holding other traffic when the jumbo jet is taxiing.

The FAA granted the waiver based on an analysis of taxiway centerline deviations, which found just 27 times a jet steered off the centerline by more than 10 feet among 4,737 observations.

The low number was attributed in part to bad weather, with more than half the deviations greater than 10 feet occurring on the same bad-weather day, according to the FAA.

Changing the taxiways at Kennedy Airport to meet the existing FAA's 100-foot width rule would require reconstruction of pavement and temporarily closing taxiways, the Port Authority's waiver application says.

"Such closures would be operationally disruptive to airlines due to the high volume of activity at JFK and would potentially result in increased delays," the application states.