Near-miss reported at KL airport

Near-miss reported at KL airport

KUALA LUMPUR (Reuter): An airline pilot suddenly aborted landing his Boeing 737 to avoid crashing into another passenger jet at Kuala Lumpur's international airport on Tuesday, aviation officials said yesterday.

The near-miss, reported by the pilot, was due to a damaged multimillion dollar radar system, the officials said.

Flights have been delayed since Sunday after fire damaged the 16.5 million ringgit (US$6.45 million) system at the airport on Saturday night.

Officials said the Malaysian Airline System (MAS) pilot had to abort landing his Boeing 737-400, on a flight from Jakarta, within seconds to avoid crashing into a Taiwanese Eva Air Boeing 767-300 aircraft.

They blamed the tight landing intervals and Eva Air pilot's slow taxiing for the incident involving the two scheduled passenger flights at 2.23 p.m. local time on Tuesday. It was not known how many people were on board the two aircraft.