Runway Incursions Can Ruin Your Day

By Author: Aviation Communication
Total Articles: 4
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It is clear that we have witnessed many air collisions early this year. As experts spend months to unveil causes of such accident the answer laid with air traffic controllers. The system is overwhelmed with an acute shortage of talent, expertise and good controllers.

Runway Incursions Can Ruin Your Day

It is clear that we have witnessed many air collisions early this year. As experts spend months to unveil causes of such accident the answer laid with air traffic controllers. The system is overwhelmed with an acute shortage of talent, expertise and good controllers.

With all these errors airline passenger count is booming since the year 2000. This has seen a rise in air traffic that the few available traffic controllers can’t handle adequately anymore. There are simply no skilled controllers to curb saturation of air traffic. Training as an air traffic controller takes many years and needs good professionalism. Graduation from the FAA academy gives you skills for only basic controller developmental knowledge which is more or less an apprentice. The furthest one can go with this little training is helping ...
... the controllers with paperwork. 2 to 4 more years and good job training is still required to be a real qualified traffic controller. In 1981 at a time when traffic controllers were high on strikes, the then president Ronald Regan fired them at a tune of `13000 controllers. It therefore had to take quite some time to create some stability and balance in air travel. Eventually controllers were starting to meet staffing demands but still a problem was still looming. Most of them suddenly started to get high retirement percentages. In any job group when more people retire yet less are absorbed then there becomes a big shortage.

What is runway incursion? Shortages in good controllers are what have caused many incursions lately. When a vehicle or an aircraft crosses the path or boundary of another without permission, then that is a runway incursion. Airport operations errors, overworked controllers and pilot errors have all been blamed for runway incursion. Cornair commuter flight that had just departed from Lexington, Kentucky took off on a wrong highway. The flight 5191 aircraft crashed killing many passengers on board. That was just two years ago. The sole course of the crash was too much frequencies being combined by a single person. With many wrong reasons unfolding, there was only one traffic controller that morning. In the recent past it is the only incident that has been accrued to air traffic control. Because two heads are better than one we all agree that had there been another controller that accident in Kentucky could not have happened. In a cockpit, co pilots help pilots who make mistakes making it very hard for any accident to happen. In Canada Islands two B-747s crushed. This happened on the runway when a Pan Am flight 1736, one of the two, got the permission to taxi. The other plane was a Dutch KLM flight 4805 which was waiting in position for takeoff as ordered. On the contrary Captain Van Zane led the KLM aircraft for takeoff which saw a high-speed head on collision. Both of the planes were at a high speed with full tanks of fuel. The accident left 500 dead people making it the worst accident in the history of aviation.

There are new innovations to curb these accidents. Ground radar allows traffic controllers view the ground creating no room for errors. Just in case of any error they are able to detect it early enough. Situational awareness has also made a safe environment. With all that in place FAA still admit air incursion is still a problem and measure are in place to curb it.
Resource: http://www.acss.com/