By Dan Schlossberg
ConsumerAffairs.com
May 6, 2006
The greatest danger airliners face is getting off the ground without hitting each other. So say legions of pilots, who insist they need immediate installation of a new lighting system designed to prevent collisions on crowded runways.
A runway status light system, already installed at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, works much like a highway traffic light. When it flashes red, traffic must halt.
But installing the new technology elsewhere has hit a snag, primarily since the Federal Aviation Agency lacks the money to fund it.
The same problem has prevented installation of a new computer system designed to track planes on the ground. Scheduled to be added at 35 airports after a successful test run at DFW, the system may be years away from implementation.
That's bad news for airlines, which have used technology to virtually eliminate wind-shear crashes and midair collisions but still must worry about human error on the ground.
Controllers, not pilots, are warned about planes that are too close on the ground. Sometimes, they make mistakes.
Consider these runway mishaps:
• Two 747s, a KLM flight with 248 passengers and a Pan Am flight with 396
people aboard, met head-on after they took off in opposite directions on the same runaway in fog-shrouded Tenerife Airport on March 27, 1977. The
Canary Islands crash killed 574, the most lives ever lost in an aviation accident.
• Runway collisions have killed 76 people in the United States since 1990.
• Two 747s came within 75 feet of each other at Chicago O'Hare in 1999.
The problem needs a fix: more than 300 runway incidents are reported each year and up to 50 of those are classified as "near-misses."
FAA administrator Marion Blakey, former lead investigator of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), calls the new light system promising -- a sentiment pilots and controllers share.
Acting NTSB chairman Mark Rosenker and Captains Bill Mino, a safety chairman at the Allied Pilots Association, and Jack Eppert, regional safety coordinator for the Air Line Pilots Association, all endorse it. Rosenker noted that installation could fulfill the FAA's long-standing pledge to provide pilots with better runway safety.
One reason for the delay, in addition to funding problems, is the history of failure in a previous lighting system at Boston's Logan International more than 10 years ago. Just as weather forecasters often have problems with "ground clutter," controllers had trouble using it to track planes on the ground. The computer technology of the 21st century has overcome such obstacles, however.
The DFW system couples computers and warning lights, with all aircraft carefully monitored. No traffic delays have been reported.
The only delays related to the system are getting it installed in other major airports.
