“Statistically speaking, of course, it’s still the safest way to travel.” — Superman in Superman (1978) Fly enough times and you’ll experience an aborted landing. I’ve experienced two or three. The first, in Minneapolis (1989?) in low-visibility conditions, resembled one this weekend. Those who follow James Fallows’s newsletter know the veteran pilot follows aviation news closely. He reported recently on a Jan. 13 “runway incursion” at Kennedy Airport in New York. But over the weekend, two aircraft had an even closer call in Austin, Texas: The short version of what happened is: “For perspective,” writes Fallows, “around the world some 100,000 airline flights take off and land safely every day.” So there’s that. A graphical recreation follows: A friend just earned her multi-engine rating, so I hear aviation chatter from her as well. What strikes me about this Austin incident was how much it resembled my experience in Minneapolis years ago. Our aircraft was arriving from Seattle early that morning. Visibility was so low that nothing was visible until the plane dropped below the clouds barely a couple of hundred feet above ground. As the plane crossed the runway numbers at about 75 feet, we were so close to touching down that out the left side of the plane I could see another jet awaiting takeoff clearance. The pilots’ faces were visible. Suddenly, our pilot gunned the engines and began climbing to go around. A departing aircraft had not yet cleared the runway ahead. Collisions are rare, but they do happen.…