OTTAWA — Safety investigators are probing a close call at Pearson International Airport Thursday morning after the pilots of a regional jet ignored a controller’s instruction and taxied into the path of another jet that was speeding for takeoff.

An air traffic controller had to radio an urgent command to the pilots of the errant jet to “stop” as the other aircraft took to the skies.

The drama unfolded just after 11 a.m. as Envoy Air Flight 3725, an Embraer 145 jet, landed on Runway 06 Right after a flight from New York’s John F. Kennedy airport.

The controller issued instructions for the Envoy flight to exit onto a taxiway but stop short of a parallel runway — Runway 06 Left — an order that they acknowledged, according to a recording available on the website www.liveatc.net .

That’s because the controller had already cleared United Airlines Flight 211, a Boeing 737-900 bound for Chicago, to depart on that parallel runway.

But the crew of the Envoy flight apparently failed to stop because the next communication from Toronto Tower is an urgent instruction.

“Envoy 3725, stop,” the controller ordered.

Personnel in Toronto Tower then made plain their concern at the potential near collision.

“Did you not see the stop bar there, Envoy 3725?” a controller said, referring to the row of red lights set in the pavement meant to warn pilots of the runway ahead.

“Yeah, we ah, we saw it,” the pilot replied.

The Transportation Safety Board of Canada has dispatched a team of investigators to Pearson to assess the occurrence. The scheduled return trip to New York by the Envoy flight, a commuter airline affiliated with American Airlines, was cancelled.

The safety board has already identified such events, known as runway incursions, as one of the biggest safety risks facing Canadian travellers. The number of incursions has grown from to 416 in 2015, up from 386 in 2011 — more than one a day. And the board notes that each year there are several serious incursions “in which a collision was narrowly avoided or there was a significant potential for collision.”

The safety board has already launched a formal investigation into a number of runway incursions at Pearson airport over the last year.

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The taxiways between the parallel runways on the airport’s south side are highlighted on aviation maps as “hot spots” to alert pilots to potential danger. The maps caution pilots to “be alert” to runway crossing clearances issued by controllers and says they should be prepared to stop short of the parallel runway.

Thursday’s incident is an almost exact replay of a close call that unfolded at the same spot in March when an arriving jet taxied onto the parallel runway as another jet was rolling for takeoff. In that case, the jet got safely airborne.