The world narrowly missed another aviation disaster in early July, according to leaked recordings of air traffic control exchanges and reporting in the South China Morning Post that reveal an Air China passenger jet and an SF Airlines cargo craft came within 300 feet (90 metres) of each other in Russian airspace above Siberia.
The incident took place on 6 July 2025, in the skies above Tuva, a region of mountains, steppe and grassland at the geographical heart of Asia, where southern Siberia borders Mongolia. Air China flight CA967 from Shanghai Pudong to Milan Malpensa, operated on board an Airbus A350-900, gained nearly 2,000 feet (600 metres) in altitude with no instructions to do so from Russian air traffic controllers.
This action took the commercial jet, which can accommodate between 300 and 440 passengers depending on the configuration, almost into the trajectory of the SF Airlines cargo flight O3-128, a Boeing 767-300ER which was on its way from Budapest to Ezhou, in central east China.
International aviation regulations state that aircraft must maintain a minimum vertical distance between them of 1,000 feet (305 metres). The breach, confirmed by Flightradar24 radar data, therefore activated Traffic Collision Avoidance System (TCAS) in both aircraft and required them to reposition immediately. It also necessitated the filing of a formal incident report.
Responding to the unauthorised ascent, an air traffic controller can be heard on the leaked record asking: “Are you climbing with instruction or without instruction? Confirm, please.” The response from the Air China pilot is: “No. Thank you.” Despite providing such an equivocal response to the controller’s question, the Air China pilot then blames the problem on “confusing” input from an air traffic controller whom he also accuses of making a “fuss”.
The SF pilot can also be heard speaking in Mandarin on another channel criticising the Air China pilot’s manoeuvre. “I saw your plane climbing,” he says, before asking: “Did [air traffic control] instruct you to? I saw that there was a plane ahead and it was only 20 nautical miles [37km] away and still climbing. Such a crossing altitude is very inappropriate. I guess you also heard me saying ‘request traffic information’.”
Belgium’s Aviation24 outlet speculated that overlapping radio communications might have caused instructions to be misheard, although coinciding messages to another Air China aircraft and a Hainan Airlines plane, instructed them to maintain altitude, not climb.
The near-miss comes after a number of rocky years for aviation, which remains statistically the safest mode of transport, despite high-profile problems such as the disappearance of Air Malaysia’s Flight 370 in 2014, two crashes involving faulty Boeing Air 737 Max models, a series of other Boeing safety scares, and the recent crash of Air India flight 171 killing all but one person on board.
