Search age: Search in: Near miss in the air over NT Andrew Heasley A failure in air traffic control planning left two airliners on a collision course over the Northern Territory with just minutes to spare, the latest air safety investigation reveals. A Qantas 737 and an Air China A330 were on converging flight paths and flying at the same altitude when, during a handover between air traffic controllers, there was no plan established to keep the airliners from flying into each other. On April 6, the Qantas plane was flying from Sydney to Darwin, while the Air China plane was heading from Melbourne to Shanghai. Both aircraft were flying at 36,000 feet, with their paths set to converge over Tindal in the Northern Territory at 1.44pm local time. Advertisement As the Air China plane approached the Tindal airspace its crew radioed air traffic controllers at Brisbane to report their position. A minute later, one air traffic controller handed over to a colleague, in the middle of which the Qantas crew radioed in their position, acknowledged by the first controller and listened into by the second. But that's as far as it went. The two airliners "were on converging tracks at the same flight level [altitude] and the controller had not established a plan to ensure separation would be maintained", investigators said. At 1.42pm -- two minutes before the planes were set to collide over Tindal -- an alarm went off on the controller's screen, warning the planes were just