The Federal Aviation Administration on Tuesday disputed claims by air traffic controllers that two passenger jets nearly collided at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport over the weekend.

The FAA said radar tapes showed the planes were not in danger and there was no potential for contact.

The agency said the planes came no closer than a half-mile horizontally and 300 feet vertically.

National Air Traffic Controllers Association spokesman Barrett Byrnes said the planes came within 100 feet of each other vertically and practically zero miles horizontally. The typical distance is 1,000 feet and three miles.

Saturday night's incident involved a Cayman Airways jet that was landing and a LAN-Chile flight that was taking off.

Byrnes said the inbound pilot was ordered to take a hard left while the outbound pilot made a hard right.

The controllers association said the incident illustrated the danger of using perpendicular runways at the same time -- such as the practice at Kennedy.

Kennedy was ranked the 12th busiest U.S. airport in 2007 by the FAA, with 456,835 flights in and out. (Read the FAA rankings here.