Land and Hold Short Operations

"Cessna-Four-Hotel-Sierra, cleared to land Runway Five. Hold short of Runway Three-Two for landing traffic, a seven-thirty-seven."

With those words, the controller just clipped 1,500 feet off your 4,500-foot runway. That still leaves you with 3,000 feet to plant the wheels on the tarmac and bring the Cessna 172 to a stop. Just to be safe, you decide to use a short-field landing technique.

Complying with the clearance may not seem like much of a challenge, but a land-and-hold-short restriction implies much more than a short-field landing. If you haven't thought about what a "hold-short" clearance really means, you might not want to accept one.

In fact, even many airline pilots worry about the potential dangers of land-and-hold-short operations or LAHSO, which involve two aircraft being cleared to simultaneously use intersecting runways. In a LAHSO, one aircraft is issued a clearance to land with a restriction to stop, or hold short, before reaching the intersection with the other runway that is in use. In February, the Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA), Air Transport Association (ATA), and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) reached an agreement designed to improve the safety of LAHSO after a bitter fight during which pilots threatened to refuse all land-and-hold-short clearances if their concerns were not addressed.

The practice of having "simultaneous operations on intersecting runways" (SOIR) has been around for more than 30 years. Controllers use this tool, which is one element of LAHSO, at many larger airports to increase traffic capacity. Based on the tens of thousands of safe operations that have been conducted over the past three decades, the concept has been expanded to encompass simultaneous use of intersecting taxiways and runways, as well as other intersections with defined hold-short points on the airport.

With more than 850 published runway intersections at more than 220 airports across the United States, pilots should not be surprised to hear LAHSO restrictions in landing clearances.

LAHSO procedures save time and money by minimizing the separation requirements between aircraft operations. In the case of a Cessna 172 landing behind a Boeing 737, using intersecting runways can easily shave 45 seconds off of the time that it would take to land both planes using one runway. While a few seconds may not seem like much, the cumulative effect is that airports can conduct substantially more operations every day.

At some airports, LAHSO can actually double the number of operations conducted. This means fewer delays and less fuel burned. For an airliner guzzling several thousand pounds of fuel per hour, the fuel savings alone are substantial. But there are potential drawbacks to these economical procedures.