Near misses on airport runways call for warning system | The Arkansas Democratic Gazette

DALLAS — As a Delta Air Lines plane began to roar down a runway, an air traffic controller at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport suddenly let out an expletive, then ordered the pilots to stop their course on takeoff.

The controller saw an American Airlines plane mistakenly cross the same runway, into the path of the accelerating Delta plane. JFK is one of 35 U.S. airports with equipment to track planes and vehicles on the ground. The system alerted the airport control tower of the danger, possibly saving lives last year.

The National Transportation Safety Board and many independent experts say pilots should receive warnings without waiting precious seconds to hear back from controllers. Earlier this month, the NTSB recommended that the Federal Aviation Administration work with manufacturers to develop technology to directly alert pilots.

Honeywell International, a conglomerate with a large aerospace company, has been working on such an early warning system for about 15 years and believes it is close to a finished product. The company recently demonstrated it during a test flight. As pilot Joe Duval steered a Boeing 757 toward a runway in Tyler, Texas, a warning appeared on his screen and sounded in the cockpit: “Runway traffic!” »

The system had detected a business jet that appeared as a dot on the runway about a mile away – terrain the Boeing would cover in seconds.

Duval tilted the plane's nose and pushed the throttle forward in a G-force-inducing climb, safely away from the Dassault Falcon 900 below.

Honeywell officials say their technology would have alerted the Delta pilots who had the January 2023 near-miss at JFK 13 seconds before the air traffic controller shouted the expletive and told them to abort their takeoff. Simply removing the need for a controller to relay warning from ground systems could prove essential.

'GAME CHANGER' EQUIPMENT

“It's only microseconds, but they're enough to make a difference,” said Michael McCormick, a former FAA official who now teaches air traffic management at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Florida. “The next step is to provide alerts directly to the cockpit. This puts the tool in the hands of the pilot who actually controls the aircraft. This technology is a game changer.”

Honeywell plans to piggyback the cockpit alert system on already widely used technology and warns pilots if they are flying too low.

Incidents like the one at JFK are called runway incursions: a plane or ground vehicle is on a runway when it shouldn't be. Some incursions are caused by pilots entering a runway without authorization from air traffic controllers. In other cases, there is not enough spacing between planes landing or taking off, which may be the fault of the pilots or controllers.

The number of incursions has declined during the coronavirus pandemic and has not returned to recent peaks of more than 2,000 incidents recorded in 2016 and 2017. However, the most serious – where a collision was narrowly avoided or where it there was “significant potential” for a crash – have been increasing since 2017. There were 23 in the United States last year, compared to 16 in 2022, according to FAA statistics.

Reducing incursions has always been a priority for the FAA “because that's where the greatest risk lies in the aviation system,” said McCormick, the former FAA official.

The worst accident in aviation history occurred in 1977 on the Spanish island of Tenerife, when a KLM 747 began its takeoff roll while a Pan Am 747 was still on the runway; 583 people died when planes collided in thick fog.

Earlier this year, a Japan Airlines plane landing in Tokyo collided with a Japanese Coast Guard plane preparing to take off. Five crew members of the Coast Guard plane died, but all 379 people on board the airliner escaped before it was destroyed by fire.

The FAA has funded airport improvements intended to reduce incursions, such as reconfiguring confusing taxiways. It also funded the acquisition of technology to alert people in the control tower when a plane is lined up to land on a taxiway rather than a runway.

This type of landing error almost happened in 2017 in San Francisco, when an Air Canada plane stopped at the last second to avoid crashing into four planes on the taxiway carrying between them around 1,000 passengers.

SIMULATOR TRAINING

The FAA is also deploying more simulators to allow controllers to practice directing traffic during periods of low visibility. The NTSB recently recommended that the FAA require annual refresher training. The suggestion came after the NTSB determined that a controller who nearly caused a catastrophic crash between a FedEx plane and a Southwest Airlines plane during heavy fog in Austin, Texas, last year did not had not trained in low visibility conditions for at least two years.

The NTSB's review of the February 2023 close call in Austin also renewed focus on technology to provide cockpit warnings of possible incursions and included a brief reference to the system Honeywell is developing . The FAA has not certified the system, which Honeywell calls “Surf-A” for surface alerts, but the company believes certification could happen within the next 18 months.

The FAA's best technology against runway incursions is a system called ASDE-X that allows controllers to track planes and vehicles on the ground. But it's expensive, so it's only at 35 of the 520 U.S. airports with a control tower.

“Some people thought ASDE-X was the answer,” said former NTSB Chairman Robert Sumwalt. “The problem is there are well over 35 airline airports. A product (that alerts pilots in the cockpit) is sent to each airport the plane is flying to.”

Honeywell, based in Charlotte, North Carolina, began working on an in-cockpit warning system around 2008 and tried to convince airlines to support the idea, but it says it found no takers. The company suspended the project when the pandemic devastated aviation in 2020.

MORE QUASI-REPORTS

Then, as air travel resumed early last year, there was a series of high-profile plane-to-plane accidents at major U.S. airports, including JFK and Austin-Bergstrom International Airport. .

“Traffic was getting heavier. There were more near misses,” said Thea Feyereisen, a Honeywell team member working on the system. The time was right to reactivate the alert system.

“Previously, when we talked to the airlines, they weren't interested. Last year we talked to the airlines again, and now they are interested,” she said.

Still, Honeywell doesn't have a launch customer, and company officials won't say how much it would cost to equip a plane.

Feyereisen was asked if the system would have prevented the close incidents in New York and Austin.

“What our lawyers tell us is that we reduce the risk of a runway incursion. We give the pilot more time to make a decision” if he has to, for example, cancel a landing and fly over the airport instead, she said. . “Nevertheless, the pilot must make a decision.”