And Pilots Need To Use The Right One

More than half of all the commercial airports in the US don't have a 1,000 foot safety overrun margin or an "arrestor bed" at the runway departure end, the FAA reported Friday.

This includes runways at some of the nations's busiest airports including Los Angeles, Chicago, and Atlanta's international airports. Numerous other mid-sized airports also fall short such as Milwaukee, Phoenix, Miami, and Honolulu.

Last year, congress passed a law requiring that airports meet the FAA runway requirement by 2015. This was a reaction to a Southwest 737 overshooting an icy runway in Chicago that fatally injured a young boy riding in a car on a nearby street.

The statistic is not quite as dire, though, because the 50% figure refers to the total number of runways at all airports. FAA spokeswoman Laura Brown says "Today, 70 percent of commercial-service runways have a runway safety area within 90 percent of the standard." 

However, according to Hawaii's Dept of Transportation spokesman Scott Ishikawa, "Not every runway has the luxury of 1,000 feet for a safety zone. There may be physical limitations for certain runways that we'll have to look at."

The FAA had previously said the mandate would only be enforced "where practicable" because so many airports are now situated in urban areas or in geographic regions where expansion is impossible. The alternative is to build soft concrete overruns that would help the aircraft slow down by essentially bogging down the landing gear. Brown said she expects that all runways will have either solution by the mandated deadline.

And speaking of runways, on Thursday Nicholas A. Sabatini, the associate administrator for aviation safety for the FAA admitted that over the past decade, there were at least 117 cases of runway confusion that resulted in either temporarily lining up or actually using the wrong runway for take-off or landings.

Besides last weeks mistaken landing on a taxiway in Newark, NJ by a Continental 757, there was the tragic takeoff accident of the Comair CRJ in Lexington, KY in August -- both results of pilot confusion of runway assignment.

Both the FAA and the NTSB have convened task forces to study the problem of runway incursion and confusion and how to reduce the number of incidents.

FMI: www.faa.gov, www.ntsb.gov