Phil Boyer has served as president of AOPA since 1991.
A student pilot with 19 hours recently sent me an e-mail outlining what he considered to be the shortest amount of pilot-in-command time accrued before encountering the FAA. He was trained and primed for that exciting moment for all pilots, the first solo. The student, in a Piper Warrior at a towered general aviation airport in Massachusetts, was cleared to "taxi to Runway 16 via Alpha and Bravo, hold short Runway 16." Unfortunately, as he described it, he needed to cross Runway 16 to reach Alpha and Bravo, and since he was about 50 feet from the hold-short line for 16, he assumed he could cross the runway to follow the rest of the instructions.
His training must have been good, since he wrote that he looked both ways before crossing the runway to make sure it was clear — but then was instructed to change to the tower frequency, where the controller told him to return to his original location, and he terminated his flight. Not exactly the memory one would want to be left with for a first solo: This was a classic runway incursion. Rather than analyzing who technically was at fault, the pilot wrote me with his thoughts on constructive ways to eliminate the ambiguity of such taxi instructions.
At the beginning of this summer, the FAA's Office of Runway Safety issued a long-awaited safety report that covered 1,369 reported incursions from January 1, 1997, through December 31, 2000, at 460 airports with control towers. Overall, runway incursions are infrequent events, but as our student pilot found out, if you are involved in one it can ruin your day. Comparing these events to the approximately 266 million operations at towered airports results in an average of five runway incursions for every one million operations. Although this is certainly a number that your association and the AOPA Air Safety Foundation are working hard to reduce, in the context of complex airport configurations and human communication errors, these are rare occurrences.
In the past there have been running totals on the number and types of incursions, but this report offered something new. An FAA working group classified all but 10 of the incidents and grouped them into four categories: A, B, C, and D. "A" was the most severe type of event and "D" was the least severe, involving "little or no chance of collision."
This report provided those of us concerned with GA's role in runway incursions official recognition of several important facts. The first we had expected all along, and that was the acknowledgement that GA incursions are in the less severe categories. The report stated, "Runway incursions primarily involved two general aviation operations and were predominately minor in relative severity." Even more important, your association has been defending the higher percentage of reported GA incursions by noting the size of our fleet. Now the FAA clearly states that GA — defined in the report as private-use aircraft — incidents comprise 60 percent of the four-year total, but acknowledges that GA accounts for 58 percent of operations in the National Airspace System (NAS). Actually, the runway deviation percentages of all aviation segments (commercial, GA, and military) are proportionate to their representation in the NAS.
At the end of June, the House aviation subcommittee held a hearing on this subject and AOPA was asked by Chairman John Mica (R-Fla.) to testify. For almost three hours the FAA, NTSB, the Department of Transportation's inspector general, airlines, and the controllers union espoused technology and how it could solve the problem — expensive systems for control towers that will not always alert controllers in time, and costly black-box solutions for airplanes that AOPA doesn't want to see mandated for GA aircraft using towered airports. Then I had a chance to present our position, a low-tech posture: Technology is not a total panacea for solving this problem. Situational awareness on the part of pilots and controllers is key — where are you on the airport in relation to the active runway and taxiways? Simple things like better paint for taxiway and runway striping and hold-short lines, and proper signage, are important.
Once again, AOPA put forth the idea that FAR 91.129 might need to be changed. This present FAA rule states that "a clearance to taxi to the takeoff runway assigned is not a clearance to cross that assigned runway, or to taxi on that runway at any point, but is a clearance to cross other runways that intersect the taxi route to that assigned takeoff runway." Since most runways are marked with red runway signs, why not eliminate the potential confusion? If the pilot comes to a red runway sign, he or she needs a clearance to make that crossing! The FAA has consistently stated that this would slow down operations, but controllers indicate to me that these clearances can be issued as part of the taxi instruction.
I pointed out to the committee that general aviation, through the many materials of AOPA and ASF, is working hard to educate all pilots. Magazine articles, publications, videotapes, seminars, an online tutorial ( www.aopa.org/asf/runway_safety/), and participation on key government committees all are aimed at reducing GA incursions. We are supporting new technology, but not as a ticket for admission to air-carrier, towered airports.
Through this process I know that I have increased my awareness of surface operations at towered airports. I know one student pilot who has also. How about you?
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