FAA halts parallel departures at Centennial Airport. What comes next?

The FAA has ordered the tower at Centennial Airport (APA) to stop simultaneous parallel departures while it reviews safety concerns about aircraft separation, according to an Oct. 16 airport statement. APA is one of the busiest general aviation airports in the Denver area and supports a large mix of business aviation, flight training, charter activity and aircraft ownership. According to the airport authority, FAA personnel raised concerns in mid-September regarding aircraft drifting toward one another during simultaneous parallel departures. On Oct. 1, the tower received direction from FAA Air Traffic Organization leadership to stop the procedure until additional mitigations could be identified and approved. The airport authority says neither the tower nor airport management received advance notice before the FAA directive took effect and describes the immediate suspension of simultaneous parallel departures before a Safety Risk Management review as highly unusual. The airport authority is not arguing against safety. Instead, its position is that Centennial has operated at similar and sometimes higher traffic levels for decades without an accident tied to simultaneous parallel departures. Airport leadership says it wants a fuller understanding of the FAA's data and rationale before permanent operational changes are considered. The authority has also raised concerns about unintended consequences, including the possibility that displaced traffic could move to surrounding airports that lack towers or operate with reduced tower hours. The FAA's Sept. 29 risk assessment rated APA's drift risk high. It verified 60 drift events and two near midair collisions between May 2025 and April 2026, a period with 35,551 departures on the affected runways. The eight other facilities it reviewed rated medium. The announcement demonstrates how quickly operations can become an airport-capacity issue. Simultaneous parallel departures have been suspended, regular touch-and-go operations are no longer being authorized and most pattern work has been restricted. The airport authority says those changes have affected flight schools, pilots, aircraft owners, airport businesses and tenants across the airport community. The FAA scheduled a Safety Risk Management panel on Oct. 27-28 to evaluate the identified risks and potential mitigations. Its eventual findings will matter beyond APA. If the FAA ultimately determines permanent mitigations are necessary, the decision could become a reference point for other high-volume airports that rely on parallel-runway operations to balance business aviation traffic with flight-training activity. As of this writing, the outcome has not been publicly released. What happens nextFor operators based at Centennial, the impact is immediate. For the broader industry, the significance lies in what the FAA ultimately decides about balancing airport capacity and safety risk at a high-volume general aviation airport. The panel's conclusions may shape not only how Centennial operates, but also how regulators evaluate similar runway operations elsewhere.