In the early hours of a Friday morning over Phoenix, two American Airlines jets bearing the same flight number converged in shared airspace — a quiet administrative error made suddenly consequential at altitude. A veteran air traffic controller, drawing on twenty-five years of experience, recognized the danger and separated the aircraft through precise, deliberate language before any harm could occur. The incident, born of a weather delay and a dispatch oversight, passed without injury but left behind a question that aviation safety has always carried: how many layers of human attention stand