Runway crashes an increasing risk

Although many people fear their plane dropping out of the sky, at a meeting in Washington today, the National Transportation Safety Board identified the most serious safety threat to aviation as runway collisions.

In 2007 there were a recorded 24 “close calls” at airports in the United States which were serious enough to launch investigations as a result. In 2006, there were 31.

In July, a crash almost occurred in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. “Three hundred and seven people dodged a bullet that day by 230 feet,” said NTSB board member Steven Chealander.

According to the agency, that none of these close encounters resulted in a crash was merely lucky. In fact, according to the agency, many factors are contributing to a high risk factor that a crash will occur.

“It is time to do something before we have to investigate an accident that is catastrophic and explain to the families that technologies are out there to begin to prevent this thing from happening,” NTSB chairman Mark Rosenker said.

As a first step, the FAA will be improving the runway markings at 200 airports across the country. “We’ve talked to the airlines on how they train their pilots, we’ve talked to our our air traffic controllers on how they operate their position,” said the FAA’s chief operating officer, Hank Krakowski. “We basically took a top-to-bottom look at everything we do around an airport.”