700 escape mid-air crash over California

Two airliners each carrying approximately 350 people flew within 300ft of one another over Los Angeles, California, yesterday after a pilot apparently failed to follow instructions from the control tower at the city's LAX airport.

A Brazilian MD-11 jet flying in from Osaka, Japan, veered in front of a Dutch KLM Boeing 747 arriving from Amsterdam, forcing the latter to take evasive action, a spokesman for the United States Federal Aviation Administration said.