What Airport Execs Think
When asked, runway incursions head the list of airfield safety issues
By John Boyce, Contributing Editor
August 2001
In Tulsa, it’s snow removal equipment; in Wyoming, it’s wild game; in Cleveland, it’s runway convergence; in West Virginia and other places, it’s vehicular traffic. During recent interviews with airport managers around the country, runway incursions topped the list of safety concerns, but are by no means their only target.
Runway incursions have become a hot button
issue in airport safety circles. The increasing number of them has prompted
the FAA to urge airports to eradicate or at least reduce the number of
incidents in which people, aircraft, vehicles, or animals are on runways
or taxiways when they shouldn’t be.
"The [safety] item that seems to be
getting the attention this year is incursions," says Joel Russell,
manager of busy Westchester County Airport in White Plains, NY. "The
FAA has a taskforce. We met with the FAA, the airport users, the tower,
airport management, and we came up with a list of action items for all
involved. We put out a hot spot notification of certain intersections
that needed special attention.
"We’re also putting an orientation
package together so that new operators on the field can learn, in addition
to other logistical items, about the hot spots and the concerns over incursions
— just to re-emphasize it.’’
That is not to say that other aspects of
airport safety — fuel handling, security, environmental hazards —
are not on the minds of airport executives. For instance, Chuck Keener,
director of Morgantown [WVA] Municipal Airport and FBO services, is concerned
about a small though important detail concerning into-plane fueling.
"We don’t use enough spotters,"
Keener says, "especially when we’re backing a fuel truck towards
an aircraft. I’m working on making sure we never back up a refueler
towards an aircraft without a second body as a spotter. That chance always
exists that they’ll back a little too far.’’
As an ex-military man, Keener has seen the
devastation that careless fuel handling can bring, so fuel safety is a
priority item for him. However, for Keener and most of his colleagues,
dealing with fuel safety and runway incursions is simply part of an overall
safety scheme that requires constant oversight.
Ted Soliday, executive director of Naples
[FL] Airport Authority, which also provides FBO services, says safety
is an attitude, one that’s the responsibility of management to develop
and nurture. "We are very vigilant," he says. "Everything
we do is very carefully controlled. We have a management team that is
on its toes all the time looking over each other’s shoulders to make
sure we do things correctly.
"We have staff on board who have been
in this business for over 25 years. Even with that level of experience,
we have weekly safety meetings. We’re very careful in making sure
that the procedures we develop are first learned by staff and emphasized
by discipline. We expect our staff members to find out how to do something
smarter, better, safer. We accept their input. We make changes a lot.
We’ll never compromise safety, it’s something we work on all
the time.’’
WILD GAME, WILD INTERSECTION
In 1997 Cleveland Hopkins International
had a major problem with runway incursions. Commissioner Mark VanLoh,
A.A.E., immediately mobilized his staff to improve the situation.
"Everybody got their heads together,"
VanLoh says. "We applied for a small federal grant. We put in control
lights, we repainted, we closed a taxiway that was a problem, we put out
notices to all area general aviation departments—-pilots, FBOs, other
airports’’ about what is taking place at the airport and the
trouble or "hot" spots. "We do have a terrible layout system
here; three runways that converge.’’
VanLoh says that incursions dramatically
decreased during ’98 and ’99 due in part to the closure of the
taxiway that also converged with the three runways. However, he, like
Soliday in Naples, knows that the price of safety is eternal vigilance.
"We even received Vice President Gore’s
Hammer Award at the time," he says, "but you can’t rest
(when it comes to safety). We continue to have quarterly capacity and
Runway Incursion Action Team meetings — RIAT we call them. We meet
with the FAA. We even had our administrator from the [FAA] Great Lakes
Region fly out and come to the meeting, so we know it’s important
to the FAA.’’
A new parallel runway, now under construction
at Hopkins, will completely eliminate the problem of converging runways,
VanLoh says.
For Jay Lundell, manager at Gillette-Campbell
County Airport in Gillette, WY, the incursion problem doesn’t pertain
to aircraft and vehicles so much as it does to wild game on the ramp and
migrating birds in the air.
"Out here in the western part of the
country," Lundell says, "a lot of safety issues pertain to wild
game getting onto the airport proper. That’s one of my bigger concerns."
To eliminate that problem, Lundell put up a largely FAA-funded eight-foot
high game fence all the way around the airport. "That has cut down
a lot of our incidents of game getting on the airport proper," he
continues. "Sometimes they can still get in by crawling underneath
at creeks when the water level is low. The other problem is migrating
geese and ducks. We’re fortunate to have a control tower and you
have those extra eyes out there’’ looking for birds during certain
times of the year.
A WHOLE HOST OF REQUIREMENTS
Brent Kitchen, A.A.E., airports manager
for Tulsa International and its general aviation reliever Richard L. Jones,
Jr. Airport, doesn’t cite one particular safety issue. Rather, he
talks of "the whole host of regulatory requirements and making sure
the physical facilities are maintained to standard requirements."
However, Jones Airport was in the top 20
airports for runway incursions last year and Kitchen has directed steps
to turn around the situation. He has put in runway guard lights, more
clearly striped runways and taxiways, and built access gates to better
control vehicular traffic on the airport.
Another concern Kitchen has at Tulsa International
is one he shares with many airport managers around the country: coordinating
snow and ice removal and the movement of the many pieces of equipment
required to do it.
During adverse weather, "We’re
on ground control," Kitchen says, "and we have to close the
surfaces we’re working on. We have to coordinate that with the airline
dispatchers and the tower. We do 30 minutes on [clearing the runway] and
30 minutes off. We try to give our carriers as much notice as we possibly
can before we close the runway to go out and remove snow. We stick to
that 30 on, 30 off so that they can depend on it.
"We have to make sure we are coordinated
with the tower to have clearance if we’re on an active runway or
taxiway. And we have to make sure that the tower, the airlines, and all
the people understand what is closed and what is open.’’
Radar; Environmental
While runway incursions and coordinating
snow removal aren’t at the top of the safety agenda at Asheville
[NC] Regional Airport, its director, C.M. (Mike) Armour, A.A.E., wants
to enhance safety by increasing the scope of his surveillance radar.
"We’d like to see the FAA take
a look at upgrading [it]," Armour says. "And along with the
upgrade we’re asking them to take a look at the site location of
the antenna. We’re in a mountainous region, and where the antenna
is precludes us some coverage areas. If we could find another site at
a higher elevation it would afford us much better coverage. I’m not
insinuating that the operation is unsafe now; but with a new site location,
they could make some enhancements that would certainly enhance safety."
Concern for the environment also has Armour
keeping a watchful eye on fuel handling and distribution at his airport.
"We’re obviously concerned about safety involving environmental
issues," he says. "They have to come into play because of the
potential consequences....
"We’re very close to a river,
so the implications of any kind of environmental situation from an oil
spill or whatever are fairly significant for a disaster [to] occur. We
haven’t had any situations of any magnitude, but nonetheless those
are still things that are in the forefront of your mind."
TRAINING. RE-TRAINING
To deal with incursions, fuel handling mishaps,
and other safety issues at airports, many airport executives emphasize
better training and re-training.
Soliday relates that a couple of years ago
two incursions in close proximity to each other occurred at his airport.
That set off a flurry of activity to discover why the incursions took
place — why a contract employee and an airline employee took it upon
themselves, in one instance, to walk across an active runway, and in the
other, to drive across.
"We heightened our training,"
Soliday says. "...Not only did we take aggressive action to make
sure all of our airline employees were retrained on vehicle movements
on the AOA, but further than that, we recognized that an airline employee
is typically more trained than an FBO [employee]. So we did the same thing
with all of our FBO’s [personnel] and all of our operators on the
airport. We also worked with the young man who made the mistake [of walking
across] and tried to understand what was going through his mind, and we
changed our training program to help stabilize it.’’
Russell at Westchester has, in response
to the problem of incursions, increased driver training for driver certification
on the airport. "For people that have permits to drive vehicles on
the aeronautical surface, we’ve augmented the training and we are
going to increase the recurrent training aspect of it," he says.
Keener thinks that too much of the responsibility
for training fuel handlers lies with the airports. He would like to see
more coordination, cooperation, and communication between the airports
and the fuel companies.
