Two planes were forced to abort landings at San Francisco International Airpot last week after pilots spotted a Southwest Airlines jet taxiing across runways they had been cleared to land on.

The Federal Aviation Administration says that the Southwest plane cleared the runways while the other planes passed overhead and that a decision to abort the landings was “precautionary.”

An air traffic controller at the airport told the Southwest pilots they should not have been on the runways during the 19 May incident, according to The Associated Press.

Officials say that an inbound United Airlines plane was as low as a few hundred feet over San Francisco Bay before its pilots saw the Southwest jet on the same runway.

A short time later, pilots of an inbound Alaska Airlines plane saw the same Southwest jet crossing a second, parallel runway, and the pilots aborted their landing as well.

Both planes circled and landed safely at the waterfront airport, which is the second busiest in California after LAX in Los Angeles.

An air traffic controller told the crew of the Southwest jet, “You shouldn’t be on the runway,” according to a recording of the incident on LiveATC.com.

And when one of the pilots tried to explain why they were there, the controller quickly cut them off, saying, “I don’t need an argument.”

“The FAA looked into the events and determined the appropriate steps were taken to ensure safe operations,” the agency said in a statement.

The National Transportation Safety Board said it has not opened an investigation into the incident.

The FAA says that there has not been a fatal crash involving a US airline since 2009.

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TRUCKEE (CBS13) – A jet plane crashed while attempting to land right outside Truckee-Tahoe Airport, killing everyone on board.

The plane crashed on the Ponderosa Golf Course in Truckee. Officials say everyone on the floor is happy to be alive.

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Investigators head to the scene while neighbors deal with the shock of what they saw

“It was something out of a nightmare,” said Jesse Quay, a Truckee resident.

The plane crashed through trees into Ponderosa Golf Course and then exploded on Quay’s front door. Everything was captured by a surveillance camera.

“We started hearing the plane and I said it was too low, obviously something is wrong,” said Quay. “It pruned a tree and exploded.”

The incident was understandably a shock to the neighbors – many of them saw the plane crash with their own eyes.

“The fireball was 60-70 feet tall,” Quay said. “That 70-foot ponderosa pine went up like a match.”

Officials tell us that no one was injured on the ground.

“It’s a miracle it didn’t hit a house,” said Truckee resident Rob Glaser

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Local residents feared the crash could ignite wildfire.

“All I could see was black smoke, black smoke,” said Glaser. “The fire started moving in that direction.”

Within a few minutes, an emergency team on their way home from the nearby Tamarack Fire had the fire under control.

At the time of the crash, the weather was pretty calm, but the air was smoky.

Laura: Several forest fires are burning in the area. You can see smoke filling the sky. Did that play a role in this crash?

“At the moment it is still undetermined. There were no restrictions on visibility. The planes could see the airport and talk to our control tower, ”said Hardy Bullock, Gov. of Aviation and Community Services at Truckee-Tahoe Airport

Local officials tell us the plane circled the airport before it crashed. The cause of the accident has not yet been determined.

The National Transportation Safety Board is responsible for this investigation. As of Monday evening, the agency had still not arrived at the crime scene.

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This investigation will be on hold in terms of understanding why this plane crashed, how many people died, and who they were.

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