An urgent investigation has been launched after a jet landing in southern France came within metres of crashing into an Easyjet aircraft preparing to take off.
Officials said the pilots of a Tunisian Nouvelair airliner tried to land on the wrong runway at Nice Côte d’Azur airport, which has two close parallel runways, The Times reported.
Terrified passengers on board the EasyJet Airbus, waiting on the runway to start its take-off to head to Nantes, heard the roar of the incoming jet applying full power to avoid a collision.
Data tracking from the flights shows the Tunisian Airbus approaching the runway, almost touching down, then aborting the landing.
One passenger told Le Figaro newspaper the visibly shocked captain emerged from the flight deck on the Easyjet flight to say “a crash had been avoided by three metres”.
The pilots were so shocked by the incident they chose not to continue the flight, which was cancelled.
“The plane was about to take off when we heard an enormous noise of engines right alongside”, one passenger said.
Philippe Tabarot, the French transport minister, said: “A collision involving two aircraft of the Nouvelair and EasyJet airlines was narrowly avoided”.
A criminal investigation into the crash will run alongside a civil aviation accident and incident probe.
The prosecutor’s office in Nice said the air transport police would investigate the causes of the incident to bring possible charges of negligently endangering life.
The incident is one of the closest near collisions reported between airliners in Europe for years.