No one hurt in mix-ups at Pittsburgh airports

Why did the lawn mower cross the runway?

This isn't the start of a bad joke. It's the question Federal Aviation Administration investigators were asking in regard to a lawn tractor that crossed a runway at Allegheny County Airport in West Mifflin on Tuesday morning without permission from controllers there.

It was not a great day for local aviation. The FAA also investigated why five flights were erroneously cleared to take off from a closed runway at Pittsburgh International Airport that morning, the agency said.

No one was hurt in the incidents.

"We're upset, and we're working with (controllers) to make sure this doesn't happen again," said Allegheny County Airport Authority spokeswoman JoAnn Jenny.

Each of the five departures at Pittsburgh International was deemed a controller error, bringing Pittsburgh's total to six for the year. A similar incident occurred in January, prompting the FAA to order retraining for controllers. Controllers committed 10 errors in the previous five years combined.

Authority officials closed Pittsburgh's Runway 28-Right after lightning damaged runway lighting on Tuesday morning. After the sun came up and runway lighting was no longer needed, controllers started clearing planes to use the airport's busiest runway, which is closest to the airside terminal where passengers board planes, said Steve Sutcavage, president of the Pittsburgh chapter of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association.

Sutcavage said controllers later discovered that lightning also damaged equipment in the tower that would have alerted them that Runway 28-R remained closed. Between 7:20 and 7:28 a.m., flights bound for Chicago, Cincinnati, Dallas, Denver and State College took off. The Airport Authority said it notified the tower that the runway remained closed after the fifth takeoff. The runway reopened about 7:50 a.m.

No maintenance crews were on the runway at the time of the takeoffs.

"There are procedures that will change," Sutcavage said. "The holes in the Swiss cheese lined up perfectly this time, but we'd like to have redundancies in place that would prevent something like this from happening."

The lawn mower incident was not deemed a controller error because the maintenance worker looking to cross Allegheny County Airport's Runway 28 inadvertently logged onto the radio frequency for Pittsburgh International, where another maintenance worker sat in a lawn tractor alongside the similarly named Runway 28-R, said FAA spokesman Jim Peters.

"What are the odds on that happening?" Peters asked.

The authority has blocked all Pittsburgh tower frequencies on maintenance equipment used at Allegheny County Airport, Jenny said.