Near-miss for Red Arrows

A Red Arrows display team narrowly avoided a mid-air collision when they came within 900ft of a passenger aircraft, it emerged yesterday.

The near-miss came as the acrobatics team's nine Hawk jets returned to Bristol airport from a show at Weston-super-Mare last August. Only a lucky break in cloud cover enabled the squadron to spot the Boeing 737 and pull off an evasive manoeuvre.

A report yesterday by the air safety board, Airprox, blamed the near-miss on air traffic controllers at Cardiff, who failed to tell colleagues at Bristol that the BMI Baby holiday flight was due to cross the Red Arrows' path. The Boeing, which carries 158 people, was cruising at 2,500ft when the RAF squadron was told to climb to the same altitude. As they ascended through thick cloud, their lead pilot spotted the Boeing and quickly told his colleagues to "level off" at 1,500ft. They watched as the jet came within a whisker – 900ft (270m) vertically and 0.7 miles horizontally – of a crash. The Airprox report praised the RAF pilot's quick thinking, saying: "These timely actions left [us] in no doubt that any risk of collision had been quickly and effectively removed."

The Boeing pilot told investigators the Hawks were never close enough to cause concern, but the Red Arrows' leader said "the risk of collision would have been extremely high" had he not seen the larger aircraft.