SFO close calls discussed in House hearing
Inspector calls near misses at airports a top safety concern
WASHINGTON, D.C. >> With runway incursions up almost 83 percent from 2011 to 2017, a high-ranking federal aviation inspector told a congressional hearing Tuesday that such incidents, including several high-profile examples at San Francisco International Airport over the past year, have become one of the leading safety concerns in the industry.
When Matthew Hampton, the Department of Transportation’s assistant inspector general for aviation audits, was asked what is the biggest threat to aviation safety, he had two answers: Drones, “followed closely by the close calls at airports right now.”
Hampton was joined by representatives from the Federal Aviation Administration, National Transportation Safety Board, NASA and the
union representing airline pilots at the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee’s subcommittee on aviation safety. The July near-catastrophe at SFO that was first disclosed by this news organization, in which an Air Canada pilot narrowly averted landing on a crowded taxiway, was a hot topic.
“The margin between a near miss and one of the worst aviation disasters in history was less than 25 feet,” said Rep. Frank LoBiondo, R-N.J., chair of the committee, addressing the infamous SFO incident and describing how closely the Air Canada plane flew above a United Airlines jet awaiting takeoff before aborting the landing. “That’s a pretty scary thought. This near miss and others have rightfully centered our attention on runway safety.”
The hearing came days after Rep. Mark DeSaulnier, D-Concord, along with Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., and Rep. Rick Larsen, D-Wash., penned a letter asking for an independent report by the Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan review agency, on the growing number of near misses caused by pilots landing or almost landing on the wrong runway. DeSaulnier attended Tuesday’s hearing and acknowledged the stellar aviation record that boasts no fatal U.S. airline passenger accident since 2009.
“On the other hand, we should be doing everything to make sure that what’s happening is not a regression. … That we’re not so comfortable with our safety record that we’re not looking at these near misses and not learning from them,” DeSaulnier told the panelists. “If that 59 feet (the Air Canada plane dropped to during the July SFO incident) had finalized in a tragedy and if it happens in the future, we are all going to be held to account, which I think would be appropriate.
So we want to avoid that.”
DeSaulnier also brought up the the subject of capturing audio of cockpit voice recorders and noted how many of the near-miss incidents across the country have ended with that audio overwritten.
“From a layperson’s standpoint … you could go to Best Buy right now and get a device that would record the last half-hours so you would at least know that conversation and what (were) the human factors happening in that cockpit,” he said.
After the hearing, DeSaulnier said in a statement: “Today, both the NTSB and the FAA agreed that access to data recorded in the cockpit can help us maintain and maybe improve our safety record.”
Ali Bahrami, FAA associate administrator for aviation safety, brought up the challenges with improved technology in the cockpit, including privacy.
“We definitely would like to see as much information as possible in order to determine what occurred prior to the accident, and recorders, in this case voice recorders, is one of those tools,” he said. “There are other ways to decipher what transpired, and at this point I think we know that any kind of a visual recording has been quite controversial.”
Hampton said his office is investigating runway safety and expects to release a report later this year.
“Our preliminary results indicate that FAA has had
success in educating pilots about visual aids at highrisk airports and in conducting outreach to the aviation community,” Hampton wrote in his briefing to the committee. “However, the agency faces challenges in implementing other initiatives, including those associated with new technologies.”
Meanwhile, the NTSB provided this news agency an update on the Dec. 29 incident at a Pullman, Washington, airport when a Horizon Air plane landed on a taxiway. A source said the FAA had been reluctant to review the saved cockpit voice recorder, but eventually the NTSB opened an investigation after this news organization’s report.
That cockpit audio, however, had a “high level of background noise” making flight crew conversations “unintelligible,” said NTSB spokesman Christopher O’Neil. Investigators pulled another cockpit recorder off the same Horizon plane and found that one also had a high level of background noise, he said.
“The NTSB is informing the FAA’s principal maintenance inspector to examine the CVR installation and performance on the incident aircraft,” O’Neil said.
The pilots from the flight have been interviewed, he said, but further interviews are pending with Horizon employees. The cockpit voice recorder will be taken to the manufacturer for further testing.