Accidents on runways: US regulator FAA raises the alarm

Boston

Recently, planes have come dangerously close to each other at airports in New York, Boston, Hawaii, Florida and Washington.

(Photo: AP)

new York The control tower at Hollywood Burbank Airport only spotted the helicopter on the runway at the last moment. The air traffic controllers stop the approach of a Boeing 737, the Southwest Airlines machine takes off and narrowly avoids a collision. Last weekend’s incident is just the latest in a worrying series of safety breaches in American aviation.

After several near-collisions, the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) sounded the alarm this week. The agency on Wednesday called on airlines to be “vigilant” in light of recent events.

Vehicles or planes have been on the runway six times since January 2023. These include “an incident at New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport in which a grounded aircraft narrowly avoided a departing aircraft, and a landing aircraft at Austin Airport that missed a departing aircraft by just 100 feet.” , according to the FAA’s official statement. The potential danger of these events is “worrying”.

According to the FAA, there are 45,000 flights a day in the United States, and basically nothing ever happens. But recently planes have come dangerously close to each other at airports in New York, Boston, Hawaii, Florida and Washington.

Just this week it became known that in January at Baltimore Airport a plane narrowly avoided a collision with an ambulance. “I believe I speak for all of us, and certainly for travelers, when I say these events are worrying,” said Billy Nolen, chief of the FAA, on Wednesday.

“Wake-up call before a catastrophe happens”

“These recent incidents must serve as a wake-up call for each of us before a major catastrophe happens,” said US Transportation Safety Administration Chair Jennifer Homendy at a specially convened industry meeting last week.

According to FAA data, although the number of high-risk situations has fallen over the past two decades, there have been no fatal plane accidents in the United States since 2009. But the total number of incidents has increased: in 2022, the runway was occupied by vehicles or aircraft 1,732 times. The year before it was 1574.

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Many are now wondering why these near misses are piling up. One of the reasons could be the lack of experience of many crews and airport employees. After all, air traffic collapsed massively with the Covid 19 pandemic, and many employees were laid off or looked for other jobs outside of aviation. This is also due to the fact that jobs in the USA are generally not as secure as in Germany.

Tower at a US airport

Air traffic control is concerned about the increasing number of incidents.

(Photo: Reuters)

But with the end of the lockdowns, travelers have come back quicker than expected. According to the International Air Transport Association, there were 130 percent more flights in North America in 2022 than in the previous year.

In view of the high demand, airlines and airports have had to fill many positions and train employees in a short space of time. Individual airlines such as Southwest have also hired less trained employees or shortened their internal training.

Runway breakdowns are rare in Germany

Hassan Shahidi, President of the Flight Safety Foundation, also speaks of a tense system. “The experience levels are no longer the same as before the pandemic because expertise has been lost,” he explains, and blames this for the recent problems.

In the meantime, some airlines had tried to soften the training criteria for pilots in order to meet the high demand and get pilots with fewer flight hours into the cockpit faster. But the chances of that happening now are slim.

Such incidents are very rare in Germany. According to data from the Federal Bureau of Aircraft Accident Investigation (BFU), there are occasional breakdowns at local airports. In Nuremberg last November, for example, an airplane rolled over again after stopping and collided with a security vehicle.

In Cologne, on the other hand, a motor vehicle damaged the fuselage of a jet in September 2022. But these are rather harmless accidents, dangerous convergences, for example during take-offs or landings, are not noted in the BFU bulletins.

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