Two people were injured on Saturday, 15 November 2025, after a Copa Airlines Boeing 737 and a UPS Boeing 767 cargo plane collided on the taxiway at Miami International Airport, compounding an already severe aviation crisis gripping the United States. The incident occurred just one day after a nationwide ground stop paralysed air travel across the country, leaving hundreds of thousands of passengers stranded.

How the collision happened

The wingtip of the Copa Airlines Boeing 737 — which was operating a service from Panama City carrying 166 passengers and six crew members — struck the nose of the UPS Boeing 767 as both aircraft moved along the airport taxiways at approximately 9:15 pm local time on Saturday.

Copa Airlines confirmed in an official statement that two individuals received attention from airport paramedics for what the airline described, preliminarily, as minor injuries. The statement read: 'The aircraft is at the terminal and all passengers have disembarked. Two of them received attention from airport paramedics for what, preliminarily, appear to be minor injuries.' The Panama-based carrier added that the remaining passengers and crew are in 'good condition.'

Copa Airlines also said: 'We regret the inconvenience and concern this situation may have caused. We reiterate that the safety of passengers and crews is our priority. We will cooperate with the authorities in this investigation.'

The wider US aviation meltdown

The Miami tarmac collision occurred against the backdrop of an unprecedented nationwide aviation disruption that began on Friday, 14 November, when the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) issued a ground stop that halted nearly all departing flights across the country for close to five hours. The root cause, according to Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, was traced to the installation of at least one new router by FAA contractor L3Harris at a remote facility — an operational failure that cascaded into system-wide communications breakdowns.

On Friday alone, approximately 9,200 flights were cancelled and a further 7,500 faced delays. By 6:45 pm ET on Saturday, aviation tracking platform FlightAware reported that airlines had cancelled more than 6,150 flights and delayed over 7,300 others. By Saturday evening, more than 530 flights scheduled for Sunday had also been cancelled.

FAA response and White House involvement

FAA chief Bryan Bedford said on Saturday that flight schedules were unlikely to return to normal until late Sunday, even as the agency worked to stabilise operations and resolve the underlying technical faults. Bedford apologised to affected passengers, asserting that the country's aviation system remained structurally stable.

The scale of the crisis prompted an emergency meeting at the White House Situation Room, where officials gathered to assess the situation and examine its possible causes. Authorities initially considered whether a cyberattack could have triggered the breakdown, but that line of inquiry was set aside after the L3Harris router installation was identified as the likely fault point.

The recovery challenge ahead

Restoring normal operations is expected to take considerable time, as airlines face the complex logistical task of repositioning aircraft, pilots, and cabin crew to resume regular schedules. Thousands of passengers remain stranded at airports across the country. This is widely regarded as one of the most disruptive single-event failures in US civil aviation in recent years, with the two-day cancellation and delay toll running into the tens of thousands of flights.

Investigators are expected to examine both the technical failure at the FAA facility and Saturday's tarmac collision at Miami as separate but concurrent threads of the same crisis week. With full recovery projected for late Sunday at the earliest, the coming hours will be a critical test of the FAA's ability to manage simultaneous systemic and incident-level challenges.