FAA plan to change how planes take off, land "overdue"

The Federal Aviation Administration's decision to change the way planes take off and land at perpendicular runways after two close calls at Kennedy Airport is long overdue and, undertaken earlier, could have prevented them, a local expert and union officials say.

"This was a failure to consider events that were clearly foreseeable," said Robert W. Mann Jr., a former airline executive and president of Port Washington-based R.W. Mann and Co., an airline industry-consulting firm.

"Those possibilities should have been considered on ... runways," he said. "It's pretty clear that missed approaches didn't just happen starting last week."

FAA officials have said aborted landings are not uncommon at airports nationwide.

On Friday, the FAA ordered that aircraft on one runway clear the other plane's path before the second one uses it. Yesterday, the FAA said further changes may be ordered.

Still, the FAA has refused to brand either incident a near-collision, with spokeswoman Laura Brown saying the changes only "add an extra margin of safety."

Both are under investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board.

The FAA also announced yesterday a new runway safety system that involves lighting systems to be installed at 19 airports - including Kennedy, Newark and LaGuardia - over the next three years. The lights change color to signal when a runway is safe to enter or cross.

Meanwhile, an internal FAA document shows a Cayman Airways flight involved in the first incident was improperly ordered to fly at 1,000 feet just after it turned out of another plane's path in an area where the minimum altitude is 1,500 feet.

Brown said the air traffic controller who gave the order was not to blame, however, as management at Kennedy should have made the altitude requirement clear to the controller.

Mann said it's difficult to say how dangerous that error could be without having all the details, but "when you avoid metal hitting metal, you've basically done the job." Union officials called the controller's actions heroic, blaming the FAA for taking so long to fix the problem.

"We've been saying for 15 years you should not have departing planes that are on go-round going into the path of departing jets," said Doug Church, spokesman for the National Air Traffic Controllers Association.

In the first incident, the arriving Cayman Air flight did a "go-round" - a maneuver in which pilots pull up at the last minute instead of landing - and came within slightly more than half a mile laterally and 200 feet vertically of a departing LAN Chile flight, according to a preliminary NTSB report.

A similar situation occurred Friday when an arriving Delta flight aborted its landing, causing it to intersect with the flight path of a departing Comair flight. The aircraft came within 600 feet of each other vertically and a half-mile horizontally, the FAA said.

http://www.newsday.com/news/local/transportation/ny-liair155763991jul15,0,4208261.story

Fonte: Flight Safety Information 15/7/2008.