The Halifax crash sparks concerns about runways
Pilot calls for new measures after weekend plane accident in Halifax
The Transportation Safety Board has been warning about the potential for runway accidents at Canada’s airports since 2010, calling it one of the “issues posing the greatest risk to Canada’s transportation system.” Following the botched landing of an Air Canada plane in Halifax during the weekend, a prominent Canadian pilot says he shares those concerns and wants to see new safety measures implemented.
The safety board, an independent government agency that investigates accidents such as the one that occurred Saturday night, injuring 25, has made runway safety one of its top “watch-list” issues.
In the agency’s most recent watch list, published in November, it said an average of 150 Canadian aircraft are involved in approach-and-landing accidents every year. It warned that number has not decreased despite efforts by airports and Nav Canada, Canada’s civil air navigation service, to make runways safer.
“Operators, regulators and air-navigation service providers need to take more action to prevent approach-and-landing accidents, and to minimize the risks of adverse consequences if a runway overrun occurs,” the safety board said in its report.
Capt. Dan Adamus, who has been piloting commercial flights since 1985, said that while Canada’s runways are generally safe, there are some specific issues that need to be addressed. For instance, the runway on which the crash occurred appears to have lacked what is called a precision approach. Precision approaches make use of a variety of ground-based instruments to give pilots a specific angle and path to follow to ensure they land safely.
“In large airports such as Toronto, they’ll have precision approaches at both ends of the runway,” Capt. Adamus, who is also the Canadian board president of the Air Line Pilots Association International, said in an interview.
“But some of the smaller airports, including Halifax, don’t have a precision approach on all the runways. ... There’s a cost to maintaining the precision approaches and it’s a risk analysis that they do.”
This heightens the risk of planes overshooting — or, as was the case in Saturday’s crash, undershooting — and Capt. Adamus is calling on the industry to speed up implementation of better technology on all runways at all airports.
Nav Canada is in the process of introducing new GPS technology to make landing safer on runways that don’t have precision approaches, but not all aircraft have the equipment necessary to use it.
“It’s a catch-22: Nav Canada says, ‘We’ll put these approaches in if you spend the money on updating your aircraft,’ and then the airlines say, ‘Well, we’re not going to update the aircraft until these approaches are in place,” Capt. Adamus said. “We’d like to see it sped up.”
The pilot said he’s also concerned that some airports in Canada still don’t comply with runway standards laid out by the International Civil Aviation Organization. Those standards require a certain amount of additional space at the end of a runway to protect passengers in case of an overrun, like the 2005 accident when an Air France plane missed the runway at Toronto’s Pearson airport and landed in a nearby creek.
Both Capt. Adamus and the safety board have also pointed to unstable approaches — approaches at the wrong angle or the wrong speed — as another potential risk. According to the safety board, as many as 4 per cent of approaches in Canada are unstable, but the vast majority of those land anyway even though they should circle and try again.
Ron Coleman, a fighter pilot, aviation safety consultant and former safety board investigator, said this was probably one of the causes of Saturday’s accident, although he pointed out that Air Canada “has a very good record and this is most unusual.” The other is likely to be a mistake made by one or both of the pilots, he said.
“Why are perfectly serviceable airplanes flying into the ground,” Mr. Coleman asked. “The answer to that in many cases is crew error.”
In large airports such as Toronto, they’ll have precision approaches at both ends of the runway.