A Copa Airlines passenger jet and a UPS cargo plane collided at a taxiway intersection at Miami International Airport on Saturday night after air traffic controllers instructed the UPS crew to give way, the Federal Aviation Administration said. Miami-Dade Fire Rescue treated two people for minor injuries at the scene. Neither needed to go to a hospital.
🇺🇸 A cargo plane collided with a passenger plane on the runway at Miami International Airport.
The nose of one of the aircraft was damaged. https://t.co/7QvrBlBzfB
— Маrina Wolf (@volkova_ma57183) November 15, 2026
The collision happened at about 9:15 p.m. local time, according to airport communications director Greg Chin. Copa Flight 427, a Boeing 737-800 from Panama City, had landed about 15 minutes earlier and was taxiing to its gate. UPS Flight 358, a Boeing 767 freighter, was taxiing for departure to Bogotá, Colombia. The FAA said the Copa jet’s wingtip struck the nose of the UPS aircraft.
“Somebody hit us,” the Copa pilot radioed ground control, according to air traffic control audio reported by NDTV. A controller then asked the UPS crew whether the two aircraft had made contact. “Yeah, we went too far, and then he clipped us with the wing,” the UPS pilot replied. The Copa pilot later reported that the jet appeared to be missing its left wingtip. Photographs published by ABC News showed damage to the freighter’s nose.
All 172 Safe, 2 of Them Slightly Injured
Copa said the two people treated were passengers, according to aviation news outlet Aviacionline. The airline had 166 passengers and six crew members aboard. All 172 got off after the aircraft was towed to the gate. Copa said it would cooperate with investigators. UPS said its crew was safe and that the company was “committed to working with authorities to determine what happened.”
Miami International diverted aircraft onto other taxiways and reported no disruption to airport operations from the collision. The FAA’s preliminary account identifies the instruction to yield and the points of contact on the two aircraft. As of Sunday, the agency had yet to issue a finding on what caused the collision.
The collision came a day after a nationwide FAA ground stop, which had already disrupted travel through Miami. By 9 a.m. Saturday, more than 12 hours before the jets collided, FlightAware had logged 128 cancellations and 149 delays at Miami International, CBS Miami reported. The FAA had lifted the ground stop at about 8:15 p.m. Friday after more than four hours. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said the recovery would take time as airlines moved aircraft and crews back into position.
Federal officials attributed Friday’s stoppage to a communications outage affecting air traffic control centers. The FAA’s preliminary account of Saturday’s collision did not link it to that outage. Nationally, FlightAware recorded about 9,200 cancellations and 7,500 delays on Friday, Reuters reported.
By Saturday night, more than 6,400 of roughly 41,000 scheduled Saturday flights had been canceled, and more than 800 Sunday flights were already off the schedule, according to FlightAware figures reported by The Associated Press. FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said Saturday that he expected airline schedules to be largely back to normal by late Sunday.