GAO: Risk of Runway Collision Still High in the U.S.
The rate of close calls on airport runways is up over last year and the risk of a collision is high, a government investigator said Thursday.
Gerald Dillingham, the Government Accountability Office’s top expert on aviation safety, told a House panel that even though the Federal Aviation Administration “has given a higher priority to runway safety” there were 24 of the most serious kinds of runway incursions –defined as an event in which any aircraft, vehicle or person intrudes in space reserved for takeoff or landing- in fiscal 2008.
That’s the same number of serious runway incursions as last year. But since air traffic operations have declined this year, the rate of serious incidents –measured by number of incidents per 1 million takeoffs and landings- increased 5 percent in the first three quarters of fiscal 2008, Dillingham told an aviation subcommittee of the House transportation committee.
The rate of all types of runway incursions –ranging from near collisions to minor incidents in which there was no threat to safety- was 6.72 in the first three quarters of 2008, up 10 percent compared to the same three quarters in 2007 and 2001, when the rate was at its previous peak of 6.11, Dillingham said.
Runway incursions are a top safety concern internationally and among U.S. air safety officials. The deadliest disaster in commercial aviation history was a runway incursion in 1977, when 582 were killed in the ground collision of two Boeing 747s operated by Pan American and KLM Royal Dutch Airlines at the Tenerife airport in the Canary Islands.
