Two United aircraft collided at Newark Liberty Airport and now the FAA is investigating

• Two United Airlines aircraft collided at Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey on Friday.
• The aircraft involved were an empty Boeing 787 Dreamliner and a Boeing 757 headed for Orlando.

Two United Airlines aircraft collided at New Jersey's Newark Liberty International Airport on Friday morning, the airline confirmed to Insider.

According to the Federal Aviation Administration, a parked Boeing 757 that was going to head to Orlando was clipped by the wing of an empty Boeing 787 that was being towed into a neighboring gate. Photos of the incident show the 757's winglet was nearly gone.

"The left wing of United Airlines Flight 2135, a Boeing 757-200, was struck by a Boeing 787 aircraft around 8:45 a.m. Friday, at Newark Liberty International Airport," the FAA said in a statement to Insider. "The second aircraft was being relocated by a tug. The FAA will investigate."

United passenger Rebecca Blum told ABC7 New York that she heard a noise and felt a "jolt" when the two aircraft collided, but said no one onboard panicked.

The Orlando-bound passengers, who were on the jet at the time of the event but were uninjured, were deplaned and rebooked on different aircraft, United told Insider.

Friday's event comes three weeks after a Delta Air Lines Boeing 737 and an American Airlines Boeing 777 narrowly avoided a collision at New York's John F. Kennedy Airport.

The Delta plane was cleared and rolling for take off when the American plane crossed the same active runway. The 737 plane managed to stop within 1,000 feet of the 777, but the close call is now being investigated by both the FAA and the National Transportation Safety Board.

While these two events happened back-to-back, aircraft collisions at airports are not common. According to aviation safety website SKYbrary, "on-gate" occurrences like the two United planes are more common between one plane and support equipment, like a catering truck.

Meanwhile, runway incursions like the one at New York-JFK, in which an aircraft was incorrectly situated on a runway, occurred 1,732 times in 2022, according to the FAA. That's out of millions and millions of flights each year.

These typically occur at smaller airports and many can be attributed to pilot error, with the FAA saying 75% of pilot-related incidents were those operating smaller general aviation aircraft — not commercial airliners.

The last fatal accident in the US involving an aircraft on the wrong runway was in 2006. A Comair Bombardier CRJ-100ER lined up on the wrong runway, which was too short to take off from, and ended up running out of pavement and hitting a wall on takeoff, killing everyone but the first officer.