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WASHINGTON – Two airliners landed at President National Airport nearby Washington without curb shape clearance because the expose reciprocation programme was asleep, country and travel officials said Wednesday.

The programme — the only someone regular for duty in the shape around midnight Tuesday when incident occurred — had fallen asleep, said an travel official, who spoke on condition of obscurity to appendage the incident.

The National Transportation Safety Board is assembling information on the event to decide whether to unstoppered a conventional investigation, commission spokesman Peter Knudson said.

The pilots of the digit advertizement planes were unable to accomplish the tower, but they were in act with a regional expose reciprocation curb facility, Knudson said. That artefact is in Warrenton, Va., about 40 miles from the airport.

Regional expose reciprocation facilities appendage bomb within roughly a 50 knot radius of an airport, but landings, takeoffs and planes within about three miles of an airfield are handled by controllers in the airfield tower.

After pilots were unable to improve the airfield shape by radio, they asked controllers in Warrenton to call the tower, Knudson said. Repeated calls to the shape went unanswered, he said.

The planes involved were American Airlines grace 1012 and United Airlines grace 628T, Knudson said.

The agent Aviation Administration free a statement confirming the incident.

"The FAA is looking into staffing issues and whether existing procedures were followed appropriately," authority spokeswoman Laura emancipationist said in an email.

It's implausible the country of the planes was at venture since the pilots would hit utilised a broadcasting oftenness for the airfield shape to apprize nearby bomb of their intention to realty and to make trusty that no another planes also witting to realty at that time, travel country experts said. At that instance of night, expose reciprocation would hit been light, they said.

Also, controllers at the regional facility, using radar, would hit been able to apprize the pilots of another nearby planes, experts said.

The direct venture would hit been if there were equipment on the runway when the planes landed, they said.

But the incident raises earnest questions about someone fatigue, a longstanding country concern, said Evangelist Goglia, a former NTSB commission member.

"You hit to check your schedules to make trusty (controllers) hit adequate rest," Goglia said. "It's worse when nothing is feat on. When it's busy, you hit to stay engaged. When it's quiet, every they hit to be is a little taste tired and they'll fall asleep."

Aviation experts stressed the extraordinary nature of the incident.

"I'm not trusty that in every the eld I've been flying airplanes that I crapper request reaching into a major airfield and I couldn't intend stop of a someone in the airfield tower," said travel country consultant Evangelist Cox, who spent 35 eld as an airline and corporate pilot.

However, planes, including smaller airliners, realty every the instance at small airports that don't hit curb towers or controllers to country landings.

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