Site Presented By
Saturday, Jul 4, 2009
What's behind the recent rise in runway near misses?
By Patrick Smith
Read more: Safety, Technology & Business, Flying, Airlines, Business, P. Smith, Ask the Pilot
May 9, 2008 | Chances are you've come across one or more recent stories about the marked rise in so-called runway incursions at airports across America. That's a euphemism for when a plane or other vehicle erroneously enters or crosses a runway without permission from air traffic control, setting up a potential collision hazard. In FAA-speak, it is "any occurrence at an aerodrome involving the incorrect presence of an aircraft, vehicle, or person on the protected area of a surface designated for the landing and take off of aircraft."
Not every incursion is the proverbial "near miss." The vast majority are in fact harmless. But the numbers are rising and a handful of incidents were indeed close calls. In some respects, the uptick is no real surprise. After all, there are twice as many airplanes flying today as there were 25 years ago. But the numbers don't match -- incursions have been rising well out of proportion with traffic growth. (In 2007, commercial air carriers were involved in eight separate incursions deemed by the FAA to be "serious.") The problem isn't the volume of planes, per se, but the congested environments in which many of them operate. LaGuardia, Reagan National, Boston and JFK are among airports that were laid out decades ago for a fraction of today's capacity. Their crisscrossing runways and lacework taxiways are inherently more hazardous than the parallel and staggered layouts seen at newer airports. That does not imply these locations are unsafe, but they are more challenging for both crews and air traffic controllers, particularly during spells of bad weather and low visibility.
Essentially one of two things causes an incursion: pilot error or controller error. The relationship between pilot and controller is, and has to be, one of mutual trust. Indeed this is one of the few aspects of flight safety in which the pilot relinquishes direct control. Flying along through dense clouds, or cleared to land on a fogged-in runway at a busy airport, he or she assumes that unseen others have not made some terrible mistake. Maneuvering through the skies and along taxiways, pilots listen not only for their own instructions but for those of other pilots as well. By creating a mental picture of what other aircraft are doing, they can orient themselves in the vast choreography of a crowded sky or tarmac. Should anybody offer an incorrect read-back, acknowledge the wrong clearance or otherwise screw up, other pilots often detect the mistake. Errors are rare -- dangerous ones even more so -- but the potential is always there, and there's no guarantee they'll be caught.
The last serious runway collision in this country occurred in 1991 in Los Angeles, when a USAir Boeing 737 landed atop a SkyWest commuter plane that a controller had cleared onto the runway and forgotten about. There have been numerous near misses since then. Last year in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., jets belonging to Delta and United came within a hundred feet of hitting each other. In a 2005 near collision in Boston, an Aer Lingus A330 and a US Airways 737 missed each other by approximately 170 feet at Boston's Logan International. Even more heart-stopping was the 1999 incident at Chicago's O'Hare, in which an Air China 747 wandered onto an active runway and was nearly struck by a Korean Air 747.
In 2001 at Milan's Linate airport, 118 people were killed when an SAS (Scandinavian Airlines) MD-87 collided with a corporate jet. A ground controller, an air traffic control director and three airport executives were later given prison sentences of up to eight years. In Mexico City a few years ago, an Air France 777 crossed in front of a departing DHL cargo plane. The DHL captain averted disaster by swerving into the grass, and the entire crew was later given an award.
(As a former DHL employee I knew all three pilots aboard that freighter in Mexico. Although I have personally never been involved in a runway incursion, longtime readers might recall that I was once privy to a near miss of another kind.)
The FAA has been working fast and furiously on developing new programs and technologies that will reduce the number of mistakes, and/or mitigate the consequences when they occur. These include an upgrade of tarmac markings at 75 large and medium-sized commercial airports and mandatory anti-incursion training programs for pilots and controllers. Now under testing are improved runway and taxiway lighting systems and an emerging, satellite-based technology known as ADS-B (automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast). An enhancement of ADS-B, called CDTI (cockpit display of traffic information), has been installed in over a hundred aircraft flown by cargo giant UPS. It provides pilots with a detailed view of surrounding traffic, both when aloft and during ground operations.
These are all good ideas, but the FAA has a habit of overengineering complicated fixes to simple problems. There will be no magic technological bullet. At heart this is a human factors issue.
Ask the pilot
Ask the pilot
Ask the pilot
