British Airways Boeing 747-136 incident
Boeing 747-136 · Incident: near collision between aircraft en route
From an unrecorded airport to London Heathrow Airport (LHR)
Event
- NTSB case
- CHI95IA095
- Event typeAccident: someone killed or seriously injured, or the aircraft substantially damaged (NTSB definition). Incident: an occurrence that affected or could have affected safety, short of that. Glossary
- Incident
- InvestigationHow far the investigation had got when the record was published: preliminary, ongoing, final or completed. Unknown where the source does not say. Glossary
- Completed
- API-reported fatalities
- 0 · all aircraft and ground
- Ground fatalities
- 0
- OperationWhat kind of flying it was, grouped by the rules it flew under: airline (US Part 121), air taxi and commuter (Part 135), general aviation (Part 91 and similar), military or government. Glossary
- Airline
- WeatherVisual meteorological conditions (VMC): good enough to fly by looking outside. Instrument conditions (IMC): cloud or low visibility, flying by instruments. Glossary
- Visual Meteorological Cond
Boeing 747-136
- Aircraft type
- Boeing 747
- Category
- Airplane
- RegistrationThe aircraft's tail number, such as N12345 or G-ABCD. Registrations are reissued, so the same one years apart can be a different aircraft. Glossary
- GAWNM
- Operator
- British Airways
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From not recordedTo London Heathrow Airport (LHR), London
- Aircraft age
- Not recorded
- Flight rulesThe regulations the flight operated under: in the US, Part 91 (general aviation), Part 121 (airlines), Part 135 (air taxi and commuter) and others; for flights abroad, the NTSB's coarser commercial or non-commercial code. Glossary
- Part 129: Foreign
- Phase of flightThe stage of the flight when things started to go wrong: standing, taxi, takeoff, initial climb, en route, maneuvering, approach or landing. Glossary
- En route · climb to cruise
- First occurrenceThe single coded event the NTSB judges best describes what happened (records from 2008 on). Older records name the first occurrence in the sequence instead. Glossary
- Near collision between aircraft
- DamageDestroyed: beyond practical repair. Substantial: damage that affects the structure, performance or handling and normally needs major repair. Minor: less than that. Glossary
- None
Cause areas
- Atc personnel(lcl/gnd/clnc) › Atc clearance, improper
- Atc personnel(lcl/gnd/clnc) › Monitoring, inadequate
Approximate · Estimated position: the centre of Chicago, IL, the place the record names. Not the accident site.
NTSB narrative
BRITISH AIRWAYS (BA) FLIGHT 296 WAS CLEARED FOR TAKEOFF ON RUNWAY 32R WITH A RIGHT TURN TO A HEADING OF 070 DEGREES. UNITED AIRLINES (UA) FLIGHT 243 WAS CLEARED FOR TAKEOFF ON RUNWAY 4L WITH A LEFT TURN TO A HEADING OF 320 DEGREES, 49 SECONDS LATER. THE NORTH LOCAL CONTROLLER AT THE CHICAGO O'HARE AIR TRAFFIC CONTROL TOWER (ATCT) ISSUED SEVERAL HEADING AND ALTITUDE CHANGES TO UA FLIGHT 243 UNTIL THE COURSES OF THE TWO AIRPLANES DIVERGED. THE MINIMUM LATERAL SEPARATION REQUIRED BETWEEN TWO HEAVY AIRPLANES IN THE CHICAGO TERMINAL AREA IS FOUR MILES. THE PILOT OF UA FLIGHT 243 ESTIMATED THE MINIMUM SEPARATION BETWEEN THE TWO AIRPLANES WAS 300 FEET VERTICALLY AND ONE MILE HORIZONTALLY. THE ATCT WAS STAFFED WITH TWO LOCAL CONTROLLERS, A RELIEVING NORTH LOCAL CONTROLLER, A LOCAL CONTROL MONITOR, AN AREA SUPERVISOR, AND AN AREA MANAGER. THE TRAFFIC WAS DESCRIBED AS 'FAIRLY BUSY' AND THE CONFIGURATION AS 'COMPLEX' BUT NOT ABNORMAL FOR THE O'HARE ATCT.
Probable cause
the North Local Controller's failure to issue a clearance which would ensure separation between the two airplanes and the North Local Control Monitor's failure to adequately back up the controller. Factors were the complexity of the airport operations and task overload of the North Local Controller.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CHI95IA095
- Event ID
- 20001207X02932
- Case number
- CHI95IA095
- Dataset
- historical-pre2008
- Source SHA-256
- 89e2df6d848e7ab3b42e7d7c7a03ff403303057a26ca04c95b3ea67201c3ce74
Source notes (5)
- Unreviewed is an editorial label, not an investigation status. API-sourced is not report-checked or human-reviewed. Explicit event totals are used without summing aircraft injury tables; onboard allocation is withheld. Unknown values remain unknown. The operation category is mapped from the NTSB-reported FAR part and has not been reviewed.
- Filled from the NTSB case API where the bulk record had no value: local date, investigation status, damage. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 1995-02-26.
- API snapshot SHA-256: d38678939b635d988f18c10a329864f4fc4be85220dc5c9cfd94c53b3b6ae6dd; retrieved 2026-09-18T18:03:24.924Z.
- Corrected after a review of the NTSB narrative, which states these values explicitly: operator. The NTSB narrative names the operator: "BRITISH AIRWAYS (BA) FLIGHT 296 WAS CLEARED FOR TAKEOFF ON RUNWAY 32R"