‘Sully’ aids bill to stop disasters on runway
2017 near miss at SFO prompts state legislation
More than two years after an airliner nearly landed on four planes lined up on a San Francisco International Airport taxiway, a Bay Area congressman has teamed with famed Capt. Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger to create legislation aimed at preventing such close calls and potentially a runway catastrophe.
Rep. Mark DeSaulnier, DConcord, and Sullenberger announced the Safe Landings Act on Thursday in a conference room at SFO’s International Terminal, overlooking the tarmac where Air Canada Flight 759 came within 14 feet of crashing into four fully loaded planes, narrowly missing what could have been the worst aviation disaster in history. Such runway incursions in the United States have increased by almost 83% over a sixyear period, and there were five highprofile nearmiss incidents from July 2017 to January 2018, including the SFO fiasco, which endangered more than 1,000 passengers.
In addition, the aviation world recently was
rocked by two tragedies in five months with the crashes of Lion Air Flight 610 in Indonesia and the Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 in Ethiopia, which led to the grounding of the Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft.
“I think the biggest threats are runway related ... we’ve picked off the lowhanging fruit for decades,” Sullenberger said Thursday, speaking to reporters. “The Safe Landings Act is good news for everyone who flies. As you know, accidents are almost never the result of a single fault or a single failure or a single error. Instead they are the end result of a causal chain of events.”
Sullenberger, who famously landed US Airways Flight 1549 in the Hudson River after losing both engines in 2009, said he remembers hearing about the SFO incident on the news.
“As I learned more and more about it ... I was very concerned. This was a very close call,” said Sullenberger, who has landed hundreds of times at SFO. “It was a real wakeup call for the industry.”
DeSaulnier and his team spent two years researching and reviewing nearmiss incidents and holding more than 60 meetings with stakeholders, including Sullenberger, pilot unions, air traffic controllers, mechanics, ground safety crews, the National Transportation Safety Board, the Federal Aviation Administration and others.
The legislation would tackle many of the recommendations made by the NTSB in September, when it held an unprecedented hearing after issuing a full investigative report, of the SFO incident the first for an event where there was no crash or loss of life.
“The idea here is to not alarm people ... we have a very safe system,” DeSaulnier said Thursday of his $25 million bill. “But we should constantly be vigilant to make it better.”
The FAA said Thursday it has begun “several groundbreaking” projects after the aborted SFO landing. A taxiway arrival alarm system has been installed at 10 airports across the country and is being installed at a dozen more. The agency expects the nation’s 35 busiest commercial airports to have the system by mid2020.
The FAA held a safety summit to examine contributing factors in landing errors and is visiting nine airports to study conditions at those sites that might contribute to such incidents. It is also studying 21 airports to find common factors in airport geometry that contribute to pilot confusion or botched landings.
Last fiscal year, the FAA said there were 13 serious runway incursions out of more than 51 million airport operations, representing a tiny fraction of flights. The agency said runway incursion reports have increased since 2011, but attributed that to a voluntary reporting system with no punishments, which encourages more reporting.
On July 7, 2017, the Air Canada jet out of Toronto — with 135 people on board — mistakenly lined up for landing on a crowded taxiway, after a parallel runway had been closed for maintenance. Expecting to see two runways, the pilots believed the taxiway on the right was the runway they were supposed to land on, according to a federal investigation.
Four airplanes — two Boeing 787s, a Boeing 737 and an Airbus 340 — were on the taxiway awaiting clearance for takeoff. The Air Canada plane dropped to less than 100 feet from the ground, and perilously close to the top of one airplane’s tail, before pulling up and aborting the landing. Surveillance video and audio of air traffic showed just how close the Airbus A320 came to striking the other aircraft.
Federal investigators found a series of issues that led to the near catastrophe. A notice to airmen, or NOTAM, had been issued about the closed runway, but it was buried in a large report.
The flight crew failed to engage the plane’s instrument landing system, which would have provided a warning that they were not lined up with the correct runway. The airport had no surfacedetection equipment that would have alerted the pilots and air traffic controllers of the mistaken alignment.
The crew reported feeling tired, and while they met the pilot fatigue standards for Canadian pilots, they had surpassed the U.S. regulations.
What exactly happened in the Air Canada cockpit will never be known as the cockpit voice recorder’s twohour data were erased after the plane took off the next morning. The near miss did not meet the standards for automatically removing the equipment.
DeSaulnier’s legislation would:
Require the FAA to implement systems to alert pilots and air traffic controllers if a plane is not aligned with a runway.
Require the FAA to gather data and report on which airlines require instrument landings under which circumstances and issue guidance on the best techniques.
Modernize the NOTAM system to synchronize with the International Civil Aviation Organization standards.
Require the General Accountability Office to conduct a study on cockpit voice recorders.
Create a task force on human factors in aviation safety.
Since the 2017 near miss, federal authorities took immediate steps to improve safety at SFO. Pilots landing at night must do instrument landings when a parallel runway is closed. Two air traffic controllers must be on duty through the latenight arrivals rush. During the Air Canada aborted landing, one of a pair of controllers was on a break.
“We can no longer define safety solely as the absence of accidents,” Sullenberger said Thursday. “We must do more than that. We must work harder than that. We must be more proactive than that. We must investigate serious incidents and instead of doing a postmortem after an accident ... we must look for precursory incidents and risks and systemic failures and address them before they can hurt someone.”