FAA IG: Runway Incursions Down, But More Needs to Done

In its recently issued final report on the FAA's actions to address runway incursions, the agency's inspector general (IG) says his office found that significant progress has been made, compared to five years ago, but proactive measures need to be maintained.

The IG's report made six programmatic recommendations to the FAA:

1. Promote increased voluntary pilot participation in its RIIEP (renewed runway incursion information evaluation program) and ensure that the data collected are analyzed to identify and mitigate runway incursion causal factors.
2. Establish a process whereby regional runway safety program managers can request site-specific, redacted ASAP (aviation safety action program) information on runway incursions and surface incidents to help them identify trends, root causes, and possible local solutions.
3. Develop an automated means to share local best practices that were successful in reducing runway incursions, such as an intranet site through its regional runway safety offices.
4. Implement training and simulation technologies such as JANUS and NATPRO (national air traffic professionalism), as well as CRM (crew resource management) at air traffic control towers that have a high number of runway incursions.
5. Require the use of safety risk analyses to evaluate existing operational procedures at airports where potential runway safety risks have been identified and train appropriate personnel in conducting such analyses.
6. Require each line of business to include quantitative goals for runway incursion reduction in its annual business plan.

This IG report didn't address the status of runway safety technologies, such as ASDE-X (airport surface detection equipment-model X) and ADS-B (automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast), which are still being audited and will be made public later this year.  06-04-2007.

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