Checklist: Runway Safety
June 23, 2021
Runway Safety Town Hall
Credit: Bill Carey
Airplanes taxi to runway at Manchester-Boston Regional Airport (above). With the onset of summer, the FAA says it is redoubling its effort to provide guidance and expertise to help prevent airfield errors by general aviation pilots, especially those who have spent time away from the cockpit because of the COVID-19 pandemic.A runway incursion is defined as an occurrence at an airport involving the incorrect presence of an aircraft, vehicle or person on a surface designated for takeoff and landing. The rate of incursions has declined slightly in the last two years, at a time of reduced overall operations due to the pandemic. There were 1,753, or 3.3 incursions for every 100,000 operations at towered airports in fiscal 2019; 1,261, or 2.8 incursions/100,000 operations in fiscal 2020; and 857, or 2.8 incursions/100,000 operations as of June 11 this year, the FAA reports.
Eighty-three percent of wrong surface departures involve GA aircraft, and 86% of these occurrences occur during daylight hours. Eighty-one percent of wrong surface arrivals involve GA aircraft, and 95% of these events occur with visibility of more than 3 miles.
The FAA held a virtual town hall event on GA Runway Safety on June 16 at which safety executives and experienced pilots offered safe piloting tips, some of which are summarized in this Checklist. The entire event can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpLPTZsijfk
Know Your Airports
Credit: FAA
Veronica Cote, pilot, instructor and associate professor of aviation science, Bridgewater State University, Massachusetts:
“Clearly the most important thing is to be familiar with your home airport, your destination airport and any alternate [airport] that you may have along your route of flight.
I would like to make sure that we pre-flight our winds, pre-flight our anticipated taxiway routes, pre-flight our FBO—some places may have closed or moved to a different place on the field, so it wouldn’t be a bad idea to pick up the phone and call to make sure that your intended FBO is still actually where you think they are at your destination airport. Also, of course check the NOTAMs for any sort of runway construction or closures.
Download and study carefully your airport diagrams. They’re available on the FAA’s website (https://www.faa.gov/airports/runway_safety/diagrams/) but also on other sites such as AirNav (https://www.airnav.com/) or ForeFlight if you have that in your airplane.
The airport diagram doesn’t necessarily [indicate] the runway hold sign; they do certainly show the land and hold-short places on the runway. What I like to do is print out a copy of the airport diagram and mark them up so I know where the runway hold-short sign is. Oftentimes the hold-short sign far from the runway threshold. It can be quite a ways down before the taxiway turns to face the departure direction, so it’s important to be cognizant where it is."
Be Aware Of Intersections
Credit: FAA
Rob Mark, Chicago-based business jet pilot, Certified Flight Instructor and aviation journalist:
“What’s really important when you are on the ground at an airport that you don’t know, hopefully, you have pre-flighted the taxi chart so at least you know where certain intersections are. Usually the ones that are 90 degrees to you are pretty obvious to most pilots. It’s those that come at you from odd angles, say 30 deg. headed one way to intersect you or sometimes an intersection pops up on you because it only runs one way up to a particular [section] of runway and there’s nothing on the other side—things that you really might not expect. And of course, at night it’s even more difficult if you don’t know the airport.
Complacency: Complacency means that you’ve gotten so used to a situation that you feel like you need absolutely no help, but that doesn’t mean that there is a not a hazard somewhere that has popped up since you last moved on the airport. Or, when you receive taxi instructions to a particular runway—you’re so used to hearing that, you may hear it even when that’s not exactly what the controller told you because perhaps something is different today, perhaps a taxiway is closed or perhaps there is some other blockage on some far end of the airport. You really need to be sure when you live at that airport that you are actually doing what they’re asking you to do. [And] the number of times I see people trying to text on their phone while they’re taxiing…Please don’t do that. We have important things going on that we need to pay attention to.”
Situational Awareness And Perspective
Credit: Bill Carey
Situational awareness “means that we want to avoid distractions while taxiing on the ground,” says Cote. “You tell your passengers that once that airplane starts to move, it’s a sterile cockpit. We want to make sure that we are listening for any updates from ATC, and tune into the picture of what’s going on in time and space around that airport and what other aircraft are moving and who else is coming in for landing. It’s very important to build our picture because we are going to be part of this 3D/4D environment.”
Perspective: “One thing I have told my students, especially over the last few years since it’s been in operation, is to use Google Earth because you can log on to Google Earth at an airport and get a different perspective from what you may see on a two-dimensional chart,” says Mark.
“Perspective is really important. In the cockpit on a Gulfstream GV, [the pilot] is probably sitting 12-15 ft. above the ground. When [you] are in a Piper Cherokee, you’re much lower to the ground, and the airport looks very different because you don’t have the ability to look ahead and look down on those intersections.”
Animals On The Airfield
Credit: U.S. Department of Agriculture
Jamal Wilson, management and program analyst, FAA Surveillance Services Office:
“I went flying after a fairly substantial period of rain and the grass at the airport [was] quite a bit higher than what we would normally see. Because I didn’t necessarily take that into account at the time—I saw that the grass was a little thick—I didn’t think past that. A family of raccoons or possums shot out from the grass, trying to get across the concrete. I was able to stop in enough time, but that just reminded me that I’ve got to think past what I am seeing.”
Michael Meyers, manager, FAA Airport Engineering Division:
“When you see something that isn’t right, definitely report it, because the airport operator has a responsibility to make sure that it is a safe environment. Critters like high grass because it enables them to hide from the predators. If you report that you see a family of squirrels or raccoons or even coyotes, you want to report that to make sure that the airport operator cuts the grass.”
Meyers adds: “When you are taxiing, you [can] come across odd angles and taxiways. That is often a leading cause of runway incursions—when you have wide geometry, confusing turns; when you come to an intersection with multiple ways you can go, especially if it’s not a right angle or a straight-on approach. A lot of general aviation airports are old World War II bases on which the runways are longer and wider than they really need to be. Sometimes wide expanses of pavement can cause confusion because you lose track of where you should be on that pavement on centerline, and sometimes it causes the signage to be so far apart from the centerline that you can’t even see it, especially coming from a small aircraft.”
FAA Runway Safety Resources
Credit: FAA
Glen Martin, FAA Air Traffic Organization vice president of safety and technical training:
“To all of the GA pilots, as air traffic operations increase across the country this summer, please use runway safety best practices to reduce airfield errors and lower the potential for accidents. Please remain vigilant by following key safety practices in such areas as preflight preparation, maintaining your situational awareness, being very clear and focused when you are communicating and listening, and also have a good knowledge of the runway geometry and signage at both your departure and destination [airports].
FAA Resources For Pilots
*Contact your FAA Flight Standards District Office to ask about their flight safety team, “which exists to assist general aviation pilots.”
*FAA Advisory Circular (AC) 91-92, “Pilot’s Guide to a Preflight Briefing,” provides guidelines for the implementation of preflight self-briefings, including planning, weather interpretation and risk identification/mitigation skills.
*The agency has produced a series of “From The Flight Deck” videos focused on runway safety, at www.faa.gov/airports/runway_safety/videos/ga_safety_challenges/
*The FAA has launched a Runway Incursion Prevention Through Situational Awareness program, looking at new technology that could inform pilots of hazards or aircraft that might be on taxiways or runways or on approach.
The FAA held a virtual town hall event on GA Runway Safety on June 16 at which safety executives and experienced pilots offered safe piloting tips, some of which are summarized in this Checklist. The entire event can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpLPTZsijfk