Two planes collided on the tarmac at Miami International Airport on Saturday, a day after a nationwide ground stop triggered widespread chaos and left hundreds of thousands of passengers stranded at airports across the US.

The collision occurred when the wingtip of a Copa Airlines Boeing 737, which was carrying 166 passengers and six crew members from Panama City, struck the nose of a cargo plane, a UPS Boeing 767, while they were moving along the airport taxiways around 9:15 pm.

Two people were injured in the collision, Copa Airlines said.

"The aircraft is at the terminal and all passengers have disembarked. Two of them received attention from airport paramedics for what, preliminarily, appear to be minor injuries," the Panama-based airline said in a statement.

The other passengers and the six crew members are in "good condition", it said.

"We regret the inconvenience and concern this situation may have caused. We reiterate that the safety of passengers and crews is our priority. We will cooperate with the authorities in this investigation," it added.

"Somebody Hit Us"

In an air traffic control audio that has gone viral following the collision, the pilot of the Copa Airlines flight was heard saying that they "were hit".

“Somebody hit us,” the pilot said.

The controller then asked the crew of the UPS plane if they made a contact.

"Yeah, we went too far, and then he, he clipped us with the wing," the UPS pilot, who was taxiing for departure to Bogota, Colombia, replied in the audio.

"It seems that we are missing the left wingtip," the Copa pilot said later.

"Felt The Plane Jerk Abruptly Sideways"

A passenger said he suddenly felt the impact of another aircraft hitting their plane.

“We were taxiing after landing at a normal speed when, all of a sudden, I heard the chatter around me getting louder, followed by a collective scream and then the impact of another aircraft hitting ours,” the passenger, Cesar Ferreira, told CNN.

“Inside the cabin, we felt the plane jerk abruptly sideways. At first, some passengers started freaking out, but the Copa crew reacted quickly, getting everyone to remain seated,” Ferreira added.

2nd Major Incident At Miami Airport In 2 Months

The incident comes two months after an Amazon cargo plane barreled off a runway at the Miami International Airport, killing five people and injuring five others as it struck vehicles and was engulfed in flames.

The aircraft, a Boeing 767, overran the runway around 2 pm on September 6 after arriving from San Juan, Puerto Rico.

Flight data released by investigators suggested that the plane tried to abort a landing before it tore through a perimeter fence and slammed into two vehicles.

US Flight Chaos Spills Into Weekend

The collision at the Miami airport comes at a time when US air travel is struggling to recover from the longest nationwide flight suspension since the September 2001 terrorist attacks, with thousands of cancellations following an outage on Friday.

Photo Credit: AFP

The Federal Aviation Administration issued the ground stop after an outage that affected a network that handles critical radio frequencies used by air traffic controllers to communicate with pilots.

The nearly five-hour shutdown has disrupted more than 20,000 flights since Friday, and the officials believe that a fault in a single router installed by a government contractor, L3Harris, led to the outage.

READ | How A Single Router May Have Disrupted US Air Traffic For 5 Hours

FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said the airlines expect to return to their normal flight schedules by the end of business on Sunday.