The harrowing near-miss between a Southwest Airlines plane and a private jet at a Chicago airport was a failure of the private jet crew to listen to air traffic control instructions, according to National Transportation Safety Board chair Jennifer Homendy.

Homendy made the statement during a Wednesday morning appearance on “Fox & Friends,” saying the Flexjet crew had been instructed to “line up and wait and hold short of runway 31C, which Southwest was landing on, and they failed to do so.”

Homendy noted, however, that the NTSB still has to conduct its investigation before coming to any final conclusions or taking any punitive action against the Flexjet crew.

“There’s a lot of information we still have to collect. We want to know what was going on in the cockpit of that airplane,” Homendy said. “We will collect air traffic control communications. We have asked for the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder from Flexjet.”

The incident in Chicago comes after a series of aviation disasters across the country, several of them fatal.

Investigators search through wreckage in Washington, D.C. following a midair collision. (NTSB)

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy tamped up scrutiny on America’s air travel systems after a helicopter collided with a commercial airliner over Washington, D.C., killing more than 60 people.

Less than 48 hours later, a medical ambulance flight crashed in Philadelphia, leaving seven people dead.

Last week, two small planes collided midair at a regional airport in Arizona, killing two people.