Prince Charles's plane in near miss with airliner: report

0 Comments | AFP, July, 2004

LONDON (AFP) — A plane carrying British heir to the throne Prince Charles was involved in a near miss with a passenger jet in the skies over southern England, a report said.

The flight in March, carrying Charles to a memorial service for victims of the Madrid train bombings, came "within seconds" of colliding with an Airbus A321 airliner carrying 186 passengers, the Sun newspaper reported.

Such was the seriousness of the incident, just west of London, that the pilots of both planes reported it to Britain's Civil Aviation Authority (CAA), the report added.

"Both planes were lucky not to have collided. It was very hairy, to say the least," an unnamed air traffic control source was quoted as saying.

A page on the CAA's Internet site listing near misses...