2022-11 · NASA ASRS report 1948759
Air carrier flight crew reported a ground conflict with vehicle during taxi at ORD airport.
This is being filed for awareness of continued ground safety concerns and hazards at ORD. This past weekend; an employee bus with a company airline logo came extremely close to colliding with an Aircraft X. The Aircraft X; painted with a different company's livery; was taxiing northbound on Alpha (A) taxiway as we were in trail. As the Aircraft X approached near intersection A13; I noticed the aforementioned bus rapidly crossing the intersection so as to avoid having to wait for two aircraft. The bus made its way to either G or H terminal. From our position; the bus came extremely close to colliding with the Aircraft X and our view was rapidly confirmed when the Aircraft X crew immediately reported the incident. Had the bus collided with the aircraft; this would have been a complete catastrophe. To our surprise; Ground Control was going to simply let this go with no further action! If ground vehicles don't have ASDE-X transponders onboard; perhaps it's time to get them retrofitted or come-up with other means of ensuring that this kind of action does not lead to an unnecessary ground collision. Drivers need to be accountable for this type of action; otherwise we will continue to expose passengers and ground personnel to risky driver behavior.
Source: NASA Aviation Safety Reporting System (public domain). Reports are voluntary submissions and are not verified by NASA.
Loading the flight search…
Pick an aircraft model — Boeing 737, Airbus A320, A380, Boeing 787 Dreamliner and more — enter your origin airport, and FlightFinder shows every route that plane flies from there with live fares.
We support Boeing 737/747/757/767/777/787, the full Airbus A220/A319/A320/A321/A330/A340/A350/A380 family, Embraer E170/E175/E190/E195, Bombardier CRJ and Dash 8, and the ATR 42/72 turboprops.
Search and schedules are free. Pro ($4.99/month, $39/year, or $99 one-time lifetime) unlocks the enriched flight card — on-time stats, CO₂ per passenger, amenities, live gate & weather — plus My Trips with push alerts.
Live schedules come from Amadeus, AeroDataBox and Travelpayouts. Observed routes (which aircraft actually flew a given city pair) are crowdsourced from adsb.lol ADS-B data under the Open Database License.