Southwest Region 3^rd^ Annual Runway Safety Summit

Wednesday, May 29, 2002

John Pallante: First I would like to thank Paul and Ruth for inviting me
to spend some time with you at the summit. One of the things you need to
realize is public scrutiny is, once again, knocking on the door of
runway safety. Monday of last week the "USA Today" ran an editorial that
claimed after a decade of promises, the FAA has failed to implement a
program to prevent runway incursions or the dangers of runway
incursions. The basis for the editorial was that the National
Transportation Safety Board by unanimous vote again put runway safety as
its top ten most wanted safety improvements.

Believe it or not, the office of runway safety was fine with the
attention. In fact, we welcomed it. Even though the overall numbers of
runway incursions have been decreasing over the last year, and the
trends are encouraging, we are just now starting to ask the kinds of
in-depth questions that I think matter to us both in headquarters and in
the field. The risk for aircraft and vehicles on the surface and, hence,
the risk to the flying public requires our utmost attention. That risk
is why we are working every day to improve our data collection process.
No longer can we just count the numbers or report the numbers of how
runway safety is doing. We are now starting to analyze the data and ask
questions. Questions like why do we cross a fuel truck in the middle of
a runway? Why do we cross fuel trucks on runways? If you have to cross a
fuel truck because there is no other way to get them from one side of
the airport to the other, why don't we cross them at the far end where
we all know, as both controllers and pilots, that is the safest end. So
after reviewing the data and asking these types of questions, we are
able to seek the kinds of solutions we think will not only reduce the
risk to the flying public, but also reduce the risk to aircraft
operators and airport owners.

We are trying to seek new, low cost initiatives. New ways with which to
improve safety on the surface. You'll soon begin to hear a phrase that
we have coined which is called the high energy segment. That's the first
two-thirds of the runway. Those of us that operate and work on airports
everyday know that aircraft are the fastest on those first two-thirds
and that the last two-thirds almost appear to be unused. We have
recently recommended to air traffic that they do a national taxiway
runway crossing guidance symposium to look at why do we cross aircraft
and vehicles in the first two-thirds of the runway where aircraft are at
their highest energy. They are too slow to fly and they are too fast to
stop and yet that's where we choose to cross almost every one of our
crossings in America, vehicles and aircraft alike.

We are also reviewing phraseology, improving training materials,
supporting the deployment of new technologies, studying airport designs
and we are developing special emphasis action plans to coordinate with
the local aviation communities and that is where you come in. Today,
here in the Southwest region, we have a wonderful cross-section of the
entire aviation community: leaders in air traffic, flight standards,
airports, pilots and mechanics. You have the ability to create solutions
for your local airports.

Air traffic -- you can review your taxi procedures, your crossing
procedures and how you handle the traffic on your airport everyday.

Flight standards -- you can look at how pilot training is accomplished.

Airports -- you can evaluate confusing intersections and signs that
sometimes leave a lot to be desired as pilots like I and the rest of you
out there try to taxi across the airports of America.

Pilots and mechanics -- you can exercise much more vigilance when
operating on the airport surface.

Is there a common message? You bet. The message is you. We really
believe that the answer to runway incursions lies with everyone in this
room. You are the solution. You have the ability to reduce the risk on
the surface. I am hoping that over the next two days, as we listen to
the panel discussions and attend some of the breakout sessions, we can
work to identify and reduce the risk. Solid data can help create strong
solutions and together I think we can lead the nation, as your region is
currently leading the nation, in reducing runway risk and preventing
runway incursions. Thank you.

PANEL - What We Are Doing and What Is Working For Runway Safety

Flight Standards: Joan Seward

What we are supposed to be doing is saying what we have done and what is
working for us with runway safety. Obviously, with the statistics Paul
gave earlier, things are moving in the proper direction. Two years ago,
in preparation for the First Runway Safety Summit, flight standards
prepared a runway safety action plan that included initiatives for both
air carrier and general aviation pilots. Many of these initiatives were
already ongoing through our safety program that the safety program
managers and all the field offices have been working with pilots for
many years. John Pallante referred to flight standards being responsible
for training requirements and, in that light, some of the activities
that flight standards implemented in Summit 2000, the first summit, and
we are still doing today. During runway safety seminars conducted by
flight standards safety program managers in all of our field offices,
special emphasis has been placed on pilot/controller communications,
proper phraseology, crew resource management, airport signs, markings
and lighting, use of airport diagrams along with recommended procedures
to follow during taxi operations. Check airmen and designated pilot
examiners are now discussing the above mentioned runway safety practices
as part of initial and recurrent flight checks. Emphasis is now being
placed on the ability to speak and understand the English language. This
was a big part of the first summit that we had back in 2000. Since then,
I think great strides have been made toward better language
understanding so the pilots and controllers can communicate better.
Newly developed runway safety reference material, charts and videos were
provided to safety program managers, airports and flight schools. Paul's
office and the runway safety office in Washington is largely responsible
for this.

During all certification check rides, flight instructors are now
required to demonstrate knowledge of airport signs, lightings, markings,
pilot/controller phraseology, communications, crew resource management
and use of airport diagrams. Use of airport diagrams is something we
have really been trying to promote with everybody -- the air carriers
and the general aviation pilots, and the airport diagrams are now on the
AOPA website and you can get that through the runway safety website for
most of the airports in the country. So, there is really not much of an
excuse for people saying, "We don't have an airport diagram." When
flight instructors or designated pilot examiners conduct a flight
review, all the areas we have previously mentioned are now a required
part of the review. Air carriers also publish runway incursion
prevention articles in their safety publications. The air carriers are
also requested to make runway incursion prevention presentations during
quarterly standardization safety meetings.

During en route inspections with air carriers, the aviation safety
inspectors observe runway safety procedures followed by the flight
crews. Runway safety practices are now part of training provided during
simulated courses at Part 142 flight schools. Many of these were being
done even before Summit of 2000 but all of these are still ongoing. In
addition to all of these ongoing items, some of the added initiatives
that flight standards has taken since Summit 2001, advisory circular
120-74, titled Part 121, 125 and 135 Flight Crew Procedures During Taxi
Operations has been published. This AC provides guidelines for the
development and implementation of standard operating procedures for
conducting safe aircraft operations during taxi. Practical test
standards have been revised to include runway incursion avoidance as a
special emphasis item. Paul referred to the RIIEP, Runway Incursion
Implementation Evaluation Program questionnaire. This questionnaire is
used to gain information from pilots that have been involved with runway
incursions to help determine the causal factors and it has been very
successful. We ask that all pilots continue to cooperate with us and
complete the questionnaire as completely as they can.

Towered airport operations review checklist, which was developed by Jim
McElvain, has been prepared and provided to all safety program managers
for distribution during safety meetings. This checklist has also been
provided to flight schools and fixed base operators and I believe you
have a copy of this checklist in your brochures. At the request of some
of our major airports, in the process of developing SMGCS plans, SMGCS
is a low visibility taxi program, we have asked the runway safety office
in Washington to assist in the development of guidance for a low
visibility drivers training program to help standardize ground
operations during marginal weather conditions. Flight Standards is now
tasked with the investigation of runway incursions when a mechanic
taxiing an aircraft is involved. We are currently participating in
meetings with air carriers to discuss the development of standardized
procedures for mechanics to use when taxiing airplanes on airport
operations areas. Hopefully, the results of these meetings will help
prevent future runway incursions of this type.

Overall, our efforts for the last two years paid off. Inertia is high
now and we have seen a permanent change in training and testing
procedures. We must continue to address human factors and crew resource
management. During fiscal year 2000, in the Southwest region, there were
25 pilot deviations. During fiscal year 2001, the number dropped to 17.
So far this year, there have been 7. We ask that our safety program
managers, safety counselors, designated pilot examiners, chief pilots,
check airmen, Part 141 and 142 flight schools and all flight instructors
keep up the good work. Thanks for all your help in promoting runway
safety.

And, now, since Jim McElvain is a ghost, he was not supposed to be here
today, but he is somewhere in this room, I will ask if he has anything
to add on this. This is the ghost of Jim McElvain.

Jim McElvain

I did cheat Joan and I feel bad, not real bad but a little bad. I was
supposed to be elsewhere today but I hung around and finally got out of
that so I really do thank Joan for taking my part and piece of the
panel. Really, I have very little to add but early on it has been
mentioned several times that Southwest Region has been well ahead of the
rest of the regions in the FAA in these reductions and I would like to
do a brief explanation of why. Just prior to our Summit in 2000, I had
gone out to Western Pacific to look at their program before we did ours
and they had some tremendous ideas. In fact, that is where I first met
Kim and Dr. Mitsutomi who had been involved with some programs. One
thing they were doing was gathering and getting ideas and it seemed like
things weren't going fast enough or they weren't going fast enough for
me. When I got back here, what we decided, and this was working with air
traffic and with airports, is when we have our summit, rather than try
to reinvent things, lets promise people first of all what can we do as
the FAA right now. What can we start rolling, and then we are still open
to suggestions. I do think that had a big impact on what took place here
in Southwest Region. Many of the initiatives that Joan just talked about
were complete when we went into that program and, again, we committed to
them and they were rolling as we walked in there and I think it has had
a tremendous impact.

The safety program got mentioned several times and it continues to be an
integral major part of the FAA. There are some changes afoot in the FAA
and since we had John here and Ruth here, I don't know if they are still
in the room, but those of you who have some stroke and some influence in
the world I hope you will keep the pressure on the FAA to keep a good,
strong, general aviation program. It seems to be that the air carriers
tend to get the majority of the attention, and that is great, but things
have changed in our aviation environment and many of the air carrier
pilots. In fact, I en routed out to San Diego a couple of weeks ago on
an American MD80 and the two pilot crew, neither had been military which
I thought was kind of unusual. When I came back a week later, the same
thing, neither of the individuals had been in the military. So we have a
lot of people coming from general aviation. I think we need to keep that
push and that press there for us to have a strong FAA presence and a
good working relationship to develop the good habits and patterns that
air carrier pilots eventually will need. This whole thing as it has
unfolded in the last couple of years, and I am so glad to hear about
pilot deviations, but the inertia is there. It's rolling. The training
is there and it is a big part of the training and testing curriculum now
in the United States so I think we are going to see continued
improvement and decreases in pilot deviations. No pilot wants to be
involved with one.

One thing I have too, I really appreciated over the last two years, is
that this runway safety issue has really caused a lot of cooperation not
only between the FAA and industry but between air traffic, airports and
flight standards. This has developed a great deal of understanding and I
think that is a major cause of why we are seeing these decreases is this
working together to solve the problems. Once again, Joan, thank you for
taking the heat off of me and thank you all for being here.

Air Traffic: Dave Medina

Good afternoon, I am Dave Medina, Quality Assurance Air Traffic. I want
to say that we take runway safety extremely serious also. We have been
doing this for a long time, back when we didn't have the rules that have
come in over the years. We never had to coordinate with the ground
controller to cross the runway. We just looked, there was nobody there
and we crossed because we knew that controller's picture. They knew our
picture. We had vehicles on the runway. But things started happening. We
started implementing new rules, mandatory coordination. This was back in
the 70s and 80s. Then we implemented some phraseology, mandatory
read-backs by pilots. It used to be hold short runway 18L, roger. That
was it. Never happened. But things started going on. We also take it
very serious, so much that we don't like showing that CD, right. But we
are all in this thing together. I could sit up here and try to explain
what happened and you will never understand but your contribution when
we leave here is we are going to make the difference. We don't like this
tape either. We have to be very careful that some of the best training
tools hurt us in the end with the public and they get on the news media.
So I will just say it up front, so we're going to clean it up.

We started back in 1991. The Southwest Region had the term runway safety
started in the quality assurance. We started looking and we needed to do
something. In 1995, the Southwest Region Air Traffic set up a work group
and developed twenty strategies and then it just kind of built on from
there. We are very proud of that. Also, for Paul Erway, I want to thank
you very much for putting this group together because, when the runway
safety program office came into effect and bringing us together up here,
we were really glad to see that because we had kind of worked together
but never really worked together and this has filtered down into the
runway safety meetings and all of that. This has been very positive. I
would like all the air traffic folks to raise their hands, managers and
staffers out there. Turn around and talk to them while they are here.
Get inside that brain and we're going to tap into yours too. This is
very important for us and, again, we take it very serious.

To answer what is working best for us, I will just start off with I
think we have run over 24 million operations a year in the Southwest
region. 24 million. Land and takeoffs and over-flights, low approaches
and all that stuff. Many of those takeoff and land at the airports
within the five states and we have had seven operation errors in only 12
months. I did a pie chart to come up with the percentage. It doesn't
even make a line on the pie chart. Our success rate is 99.99999045, and
that's not good enough. IBM or somebody would love that rate. That's
still not good enough for us and we just keep doing stuff. It's a
never-ending task. What is really working for us are air traffic
controllers and supervisors. Air traffic control staff personnel and
managers. Those have a lot of support staff. A lot of them are here. And
they are also controllers staying current working airplanes. And the
team work of all the pilots. This is from the air traffic side. This is
what makes things work. You saw one but you didn't see 18 million other
ones where it worked, where we stopped an aircraft or when an aircraft
came and said, "Hey, are you sure you want us to cross?" Those things
happen and we are not going to log them. We don't have time to do that.
We would be busy all the time doing that.

We have a national office, AT130, and we have evaluations. These are
things that we do. We evaluate towers and flight services and
procedures. We have a regional memorandum on consolidating and
deconsolidating ground based operations with tower airborne operations
and we combine positions in the towers. There are times we have to do
that. We have to pick those times because, if you are working stuff in
the air, and you combine it with on the ground and vehicles, you have
now put two types of functions on a human being, not a controller, on a
human. It's like trying to drive with your cell phone and do something
else. You are putting all of that on someone to do and that is a big
factor but there are times we have to do that so we try to choose those
times appropriately.

The RSAT meetings that Paul sponsors, those have definitely done a lot
of good for us. Again, bringing the teams in here. We share a lot now.
We talk a lot upstairs at the regional office and in the facilities. We
have a lot of quality assurance programs that get customer feedback. The
RSAT program that we do at D/FW. They do a great job. Bringing the
airlines in, the customers and we go over scenarios. Nobody else knows
about, it just kind of stays there and we go out and fix it.

Quarterly air traffic control airport meetings. We have those. We meet
with airport management. We don't just meet. There are other meetings I
will talk about but it is not that we just meet and talk about
construction, here is my master plan, whatever, we look at that and
think is there a conflict there, is that going to put us in a bind, are
we going to have a safety issue there. That's what we are there for. We
could have meetings by e-mail but we have to see what the game plan is
and we have to head it off before it happens. We have controllers and
staff that go out and do air traffic control orientation at flight
schools. Make a lot of money off that. Controllers Riverside is very big
about that.

Meacham. They go out to the flight schools and talk to the pilots before
they have to talk to us in the air. That really makes a big difference.
We have a regional hear-back read-back award program. In other words, if
a controller says something, the pilot reads it back incorrect and the
controller catches that incorrect read-back, depends on the level of
safety that was involved that we saved, like a runway collision, we fill
out an award for that. We get very good nominations. We do supervisor
oversight. We are big on that. It's a function that has to be done.
There are a lot of things that can go on in a tower within seconds. If
you don't have somebody in charge watching the operation, things are
going to get worse and our job is to prevent that.

We do a runway incursion prevention award program, the San Antonio
Towers idea, Tom Bowman, that we have that doesn't go logged. For
instance, we will have an aircraft on final and we tell somebody to hold
short of the runway and that aircraft is not slowing down and we come
back and tell them to stop and they don't stop and we send the other one
around, some are logged as incursions and some are not but that is a
save. Now, what value can we put on that? Well, we can pretty much
recognize and do the best we can but that is a big thing for us. We
recognize controllers and supervisors for preventing runway incursions.
We do quality assurance reviews. That is something we do. We look at
pilot deviations, pilot complaints, we look at just complaints, vehicle
deviations, operational errors -- we investigate just about anything in
air traffic control where we think or we did not fail in the system to
do our job.

I was talking with John. He is here. A lot of things do not go into the
statistics but it could have been an incursion. Because our controllers
and supervisors prevented it, it doesn't become one but we investigate
it to see how we did and make sure we are clean, I guess you can say,
and that we did our job. We did a good job. So that is very important.
That doesn't get promoted very much but we investigate those also.

We are working with Paul on these CDs and replays. That is one of the
best training tools but also we want to use it to show how we do save
incursions. We get the transcripts and we are working on saves where we
do save a prevented runway incursion and do a replay on it. We want to
bring up the positives. We are talking about our success rate and we
want to continue to promote that. Also, we use Doug Murphy's Law. If
something will go wrong on an airport, don't let it. We have to find it
before it happens. We solicited a lot of comments from our facility
managers and staff in the field on what is working for us. For example,
Abilene, they have a runway visual indicator, a light system for local
and ground control for the use of the runway. Albuquerque, there are cab
coordinators and a lot of towers do that. It is an extra position, an
extra set of eyes talking with Michael here at Intercontinental. They
are already looking down the road for the new runway they are going to
open up and where are they going to put the position because you need an
extra set of eyes. We haven't started using it but that is how far we
are trying to project this stuff. We do a lot of quality assurance
reviews on our tower operations. It's just a continuous, continuous
thing we do. We are dealing with human factor and that is a never-ending
issue. If somebody's got the key to that, please let us know. We've got
Addison. Nothing crosses the runway ever. How clear can you get? Short,
sweet terms. Vehicle, no. If it's not an airplane, get it off the
runway. It's just an unusual thing. We are not talking runway
inspections. That's part of it. That's safety. That's making sure there
is no stuff on the runway, lights are working, that's part of the
function. But there is as far as perimeter rules and all of that as much
as we can. And we get pretty cold about that. If you don't need to
cross, don't ask. If you have a road to go across, go around, go around.

That part of the runway where it is really the unsafest part to cross,
that's the quickest way to get you across. If you go to the very end,
you have to wait until you are airborne and gone and then get you across
because we can't go under you. If that happens, we will never get you
across and you will go back up to 50 miles. So I don't know how we are
going to work that. That is an issue we need to look at. The parts of
the runways that are crossed are the most expeditious and the rules we
have don't allow us to cross 10,000 feet down the runway when you are
already out at 2,000 feet so we need to balance that out.

Amarillo. A lot of meetings in Amarillo. Austin eliminated some
intersection departures, mandatory openings of certain positions. In
Corpus, operators performance reviews on our performance.

D/FW. I can't say enough of what they have done. I don't know if you
have seen their brochure. They have all the hotspots. They distribute
those things. They have done an outstanding job at D/FW. They have three
towers but the line of sight from the outdoor towers is also an issue
and they really work on that quite a bit. A lot of back to basic
programs, why we are there, why we do the certain things we do. Airfield
awareness and feedback meetings at D/FW. A lot of those. A lot of us try
to tap into that and pass it onto other facilities. A lot of frequent
contact with airport personnel and airport management on construction.
You have to think about this. We work every day. You work for five years
or however many years you are working. You always have your taxiways
open, got your runways open, turn left, turn right, expedite and all
this other stuff to get the airplanes up. Boom. One day you got
construction. Oops, I got to change this. I cannot turn there now. My
habits have been formed. My rhythm is knocked off. When you put that in
an air traffic environment, it is dangerous. That's why these meetings
are very important. Our staffers and managers go out there and they work
on these, we train on these for weeks and months before we get there.
Some put charts up. They red mark it. Anything we can do to prevent a
runway incursion.

Meacham. It takes concentration every minute, every hour, every day,
year after year. And that's true. We all share that.

Intercontinental. They have a novel idea. They have a red banner,
inexpensive, buy Velcro and put it up on the radar scope. If somebody is
on the runway, pop that thing up there. You can't miss it. Unless you
say, "Get this thing out of the way, I can't see." A lot of us do that
too. It has been very beneficial there.

Lubbock. Just recently we had an issue that didn't quite turn into pilot
deviation and it wasn't a runway incursion, it was a go-around but the
ground controller saved a situation when they sent an aircraft around.
Come to find out about their taxiway, the way it is labeled, it doesn't
make sense to me. There is no logic behind it. They met with the airport
and in a matter of days they got an actual plan to make some changes.
This is where all this teamwork works together.

Midland has a runway incursion device. It's an excellent memory jogger.
Again, contact the facility, the management and the pilots and just
having meetings talking about it. If you have a pancake breakfast at
your airport, or if you know of one, invite an air traffic control
person up. Invite us. We will try to drive down there and participate,
not just for the pancakes, but so we can talk and share experiences.

I mentioned convenience crosses. We try to eliminate those. A lot of
monitors up in the tower. Here is one that is short, sweet and concise
-- train the customer and scan, scan, scan. I know we also train us too
but that's an art as a controller, supervisor and tower scanning. In
radar, we have a radar screen and we have all the targets and it is
right there in front of us. In the tower, you've got 360 degrees. If
things are going wrong over here, remember that triggers something else
behind you. You've got to turn around because, if you focus here,
somebody's got to focus back there. But human nature puts all three or
four of us in the tower at that issue and we have to teach and train
that somebody has to focus here while somebody else focuses back here
because they will pop in, something will go wrong and our job is not to
let it.

San Antonio. Cross-sectional teams work on problems. For years and
years, they worked on the taxiways, that runway one. Airports, flight
standards, everybody got together and it has been changed. The runway
safety program officers really had a lot of positive impact on our
region. We are very proud of the work we are doing as a team and we had
more people involved in air traffic with myself and a couple of our
staff.

I like this one in Tulsa. Tulsa has a computerized patch that when you
have somebody on the runway, you make an entry and it blinks on the
radar 'runway occupied.' It's not a bad tool. What we are going to do
for the air traffic folks, we copied all of these down and we are going
to pass them out at our next breakout so everybody will have something
there.

In summary, key elements. Communication between air traffic, airport,
airports up here, airports out there, customers and others to identify
potential problem areas and so something before something happens. Use
of the memory aids and using them. We have them but sometimes we don't
use them so we will work on that also. Teamwork. Somebody brought up
teamwork earlier. Team work amongst our personnel, air traffic
controllers and supervisors and tire cabs, the team work between the
pilots and air traffic control because it is there and it has to exist
and we are very proud of that.

Training and education. That is something we need to continue but we
need to make it interesting and we need some better tools. We are asking
for those, we just need to find them or get a way to get those. From air
traffic, that is it. If there are any questions, I will be glad to
answer them after the other speakers.

Airports: Joe Washington

I know it upset Paul a great deal. He wanted Bruce to be here but Bruce
is here. Bruce is going to be doing a presentation tomorrow on runway
incursions in one of the breakout rooms.

I'm the manager of the safety standards branch and Bruce is the lead
inspector. I want to reemphasize what Dave said. We do have a do team,
management team as well as RSAT team, within the Southwest region and
that is reflective in the statistics which Paul provided to you. FAA had
a mission in its strategic plan. The mission goal, in regard to runway
safety, was to reduce fatal air carrier incidents by 80% by 2002 and by
20% for GA. Airports piggyback on FAA's mission and FAA's goal and our
mission in airports is to provide leadership and planning development in
a safe and efficient national airport system to satisfy the needs of the
aviation interest in the United States. It goes on to say more but that
caps it.

Our airports' goal for 2002 was to maintain zero accidents due to
airfield conditions at the Part 139 airports and to ensure there are no
fatalities from runway incursions due to vehicle/pedestrian deviations.
That is primarily the part where the Part 139 inspectors are viewing
when they visit your facilities. When I saw the show of hands, many of
you here already know that. You are air traffic controllers and look
like you had had 99% of participation. I'm not going to ask our people
to show their hands because I don't want us to be outnumbered. So if you
do show your hand for airports, raise two of them, or legs and feet, I
don't care.

In addition to the 2002 goals, some of the primary areas we focused on
is supporting funding for the eligible runway safety team
recommendations and RSAT recommendations. Many of you think about
airports funding many sponsors but, as I said before, we have another
element that that is safety element. Part 139 inspections as well as
compliance and protecting federal investments. That is mainly where our
bag is. We provide this funding but when we do our inspections we try to
educate the sponsor and the operators on the airport facility to ensure
we prevent things like runway incursions to provide a safe environment.

The second part of our goal in runway incursions reduction was to
implement a web based 5010 process in which the state inspectors would
go out and update the 5010s via the web. You might say, "How does this
help you?" Well, many of you might not know that the 5010, the master
record, is where the information comes from that goes into the
facility's directory. By having that more current, the pilots will have
the up to date information they need for that facility. You will find
that a lot of the runway incursions or pedestrian deviations or
incursions may be caused by the fact that somebody has their head in the
book or hasn't checked out the airport layout prior to going up and
leaving the gait. We are making sure that information is as up-to-date
as possible in order to prevent such things from happening.

Joan mentioned earlier that we had started this process or we had the
first summit in 2000 and I was at that particular summit as well as, I
think, everyone here and in that we had an action plan as well. Airports
had fourteen items to accomplish within that action plan. We are still
doing that. It's an ongoing thing. We have accomplished a great deal of
them but it becomes a repeat offense each time. I will just mention a
few of them and then I will go on with what we are currently still
doing.

One was to reinsure compliance with FAA standards in making
recommendations. I want to reemphasize standards because many of our
meetings that we come up with many good and valuable ideas but, the FAA
or airports organization is primarily wanting to stay with the standards
that we have unless there is a better way. We want to first explore and
utilize everything that we can do within standards because
familiarization is the key. If you had four or five different color stop
signs and you're driving your vehicle a different configuration nobody
could figure out what to do. On airports, we need to keep some
consistency as well and that is why we focus on keeping the standard and
maintaining that unless there is something better. We do entertain that
when we have our RSAT's and various team meetings.

Second of the fourteen items, we had partnership conferences. Airports
put on two conferences each year, one in February and one in October.
Primarily in February we have a logic conference in which we provide
educational opportunities for runway incursions. Last year we had over
350 sponsors come in and we could put on presentations as well as with
the help of Dave, Paul Erway, various others, Joan and people for
airways facilities as well to talk to the sponsors about things that we
can do to improve the airfield configurations, lighting and things of
that nature.

Airport driver training was another action item we had. Part 139
inspectors reemphasized operating training on the airports while going
out and doing those inspections. Not only is it important for the
sponsor to do training, it is important for us, the FAA that are on
those airfields, to do training as well. The FAA is not immune to cause
an incursion itself though we may think we are immune to some of that at
times. We can cause just as many problems as the sponsor can. Sometimes
the sponsors are intimidated, for lack of a better word, by the fact
that we are FAA and they may think that they can't tell us that we can't
do something, but that is untrue.

The next thing we had was identifying hot spots. Paul put out a pamphlet
and there are pamphlets out on the table identifying hot spots where
there are recurring opportunities for incursions. We have one on D/FW,
Albuquerque and some other locations.

Dave mentioned pancake breakfasts. We always enjoy a good meal just as
well as the next man or woman so we like to attend those as well when we
get an opportunity. That is a valuable and very important opportunity to
talk to the pilots and the general aviation community when we go out
there on the weekend or during the week.

So what are we doing now in airports in regards to runway incursions? We
are still providing education. We have a web site that one can go to and
look at the various things we feel would prevent runway incursions as
well as things that cause runway incursions. We have a newsletter that
we put out on a quarterly basis that goes to each one of the sponsors,
over 450. We also have that on the web site. ASOT, Airport Safety and
Operations Training. We conduct that in conjunction with AAA to preach
about airport operations and maintenance and how to operate on an
airport. We are looking at revisiting that course to ensure it has
become more basic as we learn that we have a lot of new pilots and a lot
of new people out there. That is something we are still working on.

Standardization for Marking and Signage. Again, I can't emphasize that
enough. That is another educational opportunity that we have. Hold lines
-- just this past year we had a goal to increase as part of the RSAT
recommendations to increase the hold lines on the airport from six
inches to twelve inches along with shadowing and glass beads to ensure
the pilots can see them better as well as the vehicles operating on the
airfield. Sometimes, they get a little confused about which end they are
supposed to stop or go but that again comes with familiarization.

Identify and fund RSAT recommendations. In 2001, we funded \$5.2 million
that we invested into improvements on runway safety recommendations.
This year, in FY02, we are projecting \$14.3 million. These enhancements
include perimeter roads, realignment of taxiways. I think D/FW is
looking at a taxiway to the North and we will do some work there. We are
looking at Little Rock to do some perimeter roads and a couple other
locations that we have identified. One is part of the RSAT
recommendations and secondly as we do joint planning conferences
throughout the region we identify various things as well as what is in
the master plans. We inspect 58 Part 139 airports within this region and
we identify at least 10-15. This year I think we are doing 10. We had to
do some surveillance inspections. As we use funding, we have to kick
back on some of the general aviations, but we try to identify at least
10 of the high activity GA airports that we can inspect to enhance their
proficiency and provide helpful information on preventing runway
incursions.

We evaluate airport operators' familiarization with their own airport.
When we come up or have some of the inspectors come up and bug you guys
in the tower about conducting the fire drills, a lot of that has to with
making sure the crews are familiar with the airport. Oftentimes, they
could be sitting in the firehouse and not really know where it is once
they are called to go out to a location on incident. If they are not
familiar, we could lose lives there. On a yearly basis, we test them on
their skills there. We appreciate all the help that air traffic gives us
in that as well as the airport sponsors who are here to support us in
those causes.

Driver training programs. We inspect the driver training programs. Each
airport should have a driver trainer program for people who are
operating on the airport just like you would have driver training for
out here in the regular communities.

Planning meetings. We attend meetings whether it be joint planning
conferences, safety construction meetings or RSAT meetings including
pancake breakfasts. These are tremendous opportunities for us to explore
things that we can do at the airport to enhance safety.

We also conduct air space reviews in conjunction with air traffic and
airway facilities and the rest of the lines of businesses to ensure that
anything being constructed on the airport doesn't interfere or doesn't
cause a problem if there is not a problem that already exists. We are
working feverishly to try to ensure that nothing happens that we didn't
want to happen.

With that, I am going to turn the mike over to Jo. She didn't want to be
last, but we figured since David Glasscock didn't show, she almost
wasn't last. I thank you.

Airway Facilities: Jo Tarrh

Good afternoon. My name is Jo Tarrh and I am the airway facilities
division manager and I am glad to be here. My role or the airway
facilities role in runway safety is a little different. We don't sit on
the team for runway safety. When Paul asked us to talk, I said there is
not a whole lot because we are users of the runway and we maintain the
facilities and we are out there using the runways just like you are.
Where we have issue is with pedestrian and vehicle travel. What is most
important for us in airway facilities is we don't want to be the
problem. We have a goal nationally. Last year it was there would be no
runway incursions. This year they softened a bit and said zero deaths
due to airway facilities caused runway incursions. We do not want to be
involved in anything that has to do with a runway incursion. We have a
couple of incidents where we get a little close sometimes and air
traffic works with us to keep us off the runway and we do that.

We keep it successful in the airway facilities in that we have
performance goals that we check on a regular basis. We are constantly
talking about runway safety in airway facilities about what not to do.
Of course, we discuss all runway incursions -- any type of incursion or
incident that occurs in airway facilities nationwide. We want to learn
from others' mistakes throughout the country and with our assistant
management offices. We talk about those to make sure we don't do the
same thing and learn by example. We stress the negative impacts that we
have with air traffic operations and what that will cause with air
traffic.

We make sure that only the trained people that we have are out on the
AOA. We don't issue AOA badges to everyone -- only to those who have
been trained and make sure they know what they are doing. We do provide
for our airway facilities technicians to make sure there is daily
contact with air traffic so we are constantly in a communication mode
with them. Anybody that is not FAA who has contractors, we go out there
and we escort them with someone who is very experienced in doing that.
We are sending the same people out there every time to make that happen.
We do the training. Training is a big part of it. Driving on the airport
area and operations; that's a standard video that we have. Certainly,
that is the video produced by the runway safety offices and we also have
the airport specific training and we mandate that all our employees take
as well. We stay off the runways whenever possible. That's a success for
us. We use the gates, however we can stay off the runways and we do
that. We make sure our vehicles are marked, have lights, signs, passes,
everything is there for that. We have radio contact with towers. In some
of the cases, certainly at D/FW, we don't go even close without having
our radios there. We talked about the AOA badges and escort for people
without AOA badges. I had to go out on runways quite often to look at
our facilities, but I never go out there without an experienced AOA
person to drive me because that is not something I want to do.

One of the things we do in airway facilities is that we use conduct and
discipline. If we see that somebody out there is negligent, we take
action. We either pull their AOA badge, we look at whether they can
drive there or not and make some decisions about whether that person
knows what they are doing, retrain them, whatever we have to do to make
sure they know the importance of runway safety. We do things for Paul
Erway's group. We send out the signs and the markings. We do what we can
to communicate for FAA and provide and distribute all the safety
bulletins that you see. We are out there just marking for FAA and also
using them.

In the past two years, since the runway safety has been such a big
issue, we have had zero incursions that we have caused at airway
facilities, so we have that to be proud of. We have successes here and
we plan to continue our efforts to keep our technicians off the runways
and the people that do the construction out there. That's all I have.

Paul: To all of our panel, I appreciate your comments there. I think it
would be a good opportunity now for questions of the panel. If you will,
I would appreciate it if you might stand and state your name so that we
can hear the panel. We do have a mike here. If you are such a person
that talks very softly, I will get the mike to you. Do we have some
questions for the panel? We heard some interesting information about the
safety stats. In my business, I look at the corporate aviation folks and
some of their safety statistics. I see that their record is equal to or,
in some cases, better than the airlines, so we constantly look forward
to interacting with the safety folks to ensure that our people do
maintain high standards. We have been losing some pilots to the airlines
but, interestingly enough, our business, corporate aviation business, is
very healthy and we are very busy and we have been getting people who
have been laid off from the airlines. As you know, some of the airlines
have had some activities that curtail their operations and they come
back to the business aviation community. We have a pretty professional
group of folks. We want to keep it that way. We want to ensure that they
all go to Flight Safety and SimuFlite and the other companies that
provide good, professional training. From the standpoint of the air
traffic, it pleases me. Dave mentioned this about communications. Vital
controller communications is an ongoing thing just as this issue of
runway safety is and you have to constantly work at that. Air traffic
has done a really good job in working with the customers and that's the
people who fly the airplanes and that is why everybody is in business is
because we have people flying the airplanes.

We in corporate or business aviation have been doing a lot in recent
times to help educate our customers and that's the people who ride in
the back. We have been communicating particularly since 9/11 about the
importance of security and being on time, so that whenever we have a
clearance and whatever we need to get off, we don't make problems for
the air traffic system.

Jo, I really didn't want to see Bruce. As a matter of fact, I had seen
him earlier and that is why I didn't want to see him again. It just
surprised me that you were there because you didn't look like Bruce. But
anyway, you hit it right on when you talked about standardization at
airports. Some of us old pilots are accustomed to seeing certain things,
and whenever you change things and don't tell us about it or fail to
change things that will make it safer for us, we need to have some
education about that. So standardization is really important. One of the
big things about airway facilities is without them we are going to have
a hard time finding the airfield. Those facilities don't drive out onto
the airport too much but they sure make certain that we don't have some
interference with those nav aids and we really appreciate that so much.
If we don't have any questions for the panel, let's take a short break.

PILOT AND CONTROLLER ERROR AND SURFACE OPERATIONS

Kim Cardosi

The first thing I want to mention is that my e-mail address listed on
the attendant sheet is incorrect. This is the right one so please make a
note of that.

What we have been doing at the Volpe Center on runway safety started
with a study to look at pilot and controller errors and surface
operations; what goes wrong and what can we do about it. We developed a
runway safety booklet, the bluish one out in the back. Feel free to take
as many copies as you would like. If you open it and it is upside down,
it's not for you. One half is for pilots and the other half is for
controllers. We wanted to put it in the same booklet but we didn't want
to have pilots first or controllers first because you know how that
would work. You couldn't win.

We have been looking at runway incursions to identify the risk factors
as to what causes them and to identify the remedies. We are looking at
airport specific factors and procedures and, since free advice is
greatly appreciated, I'm going to be saying a lot of things that may
sound naïve from a certain perspective, whether it's political,
operational, financial, so be it our focus is on safety without a whole
lot of regard for the other things I just talked about. If you're
sitting there saying, "Oh come on" I really want to hear about it.

We are looking for the gotchas in what causes these errors. We looked at
256 tower operational errors and we looked at 67 pilot deviations. You
might think, "Well, why was that so lopsided" because a pilot deviation
report is nowhere near as extensive as an operational error report. An
operational error report can be pages long. The pilot deviation report
can be three sentences. There is no information as to what caused that
pilot deviation in the pilot deviation report. It typically says "This
guy crossed that runway at this taxiway." That doesn't tell us a whole
lot about why that happened so, frankly, after 67 we stopped reading
them. We are thrilled with the RIIEP program where pilots can openly
discuss why it happened with immunity. Everybody knows that's the only
way you're going to get the really good information and that's another
part of it that is missing on the controller side of it. If they have an
operational error, they are still subjected to X amount of video
watching or whatever. I would like to see that tweaked a bit.

In order to look at why the pilot deviations, in particular, occur, we
went to the ASRS report because that does provide a wealth of
information about why these things happened as told by the people
involved. It is extremely important for pilots and controllers to file
ASRS reports on events, particularly those that might not otherwise be
captured in the database. You saw the definition of runway incursions
and there is a lot that goes on out there that doesn't get captured and
they are not all saves. There are things that John Q. Public would think
of as a runway incursion. You have an aircraft cleared to land on one
runway and an aircraft cleared to take off on an intersecting runway.
The takeoff is aborted by the controller after he is already rolling,
but he didn't encroach the runway, so that is not a runway incursion.
It's not a reportable runway incursion. However, the same factors that
contributed to that could contribute to the next accident. So we need to
hear about those events just as much as we need to hear about the As,
Bs, Cs and Ds, because that scenario I just explained that was an actual
event as witnessed by someone in this room is more important for me to
know about, as someone who is trying to figure out why these things
happen, than the guy that just stuck the nose over the hold line.

As a PhD, I know probably better than most people how to lie with
statistics. We are also well aware that numbers do not tell the whole
story. I'm from Massachusetts. In Massachusetts, we have the lowest
highway fatality rate in the nation. Everybody asks, "Why is that?"
Well, you know it's Harvard, MIT, all those really good schools. You
have some down here. You may think, "Well, people are smarter." No,
that's not it. You may think, "We have higher seatbelt usage." No,
that's not it. You might think we are better drivers. If you've ever
driven up there, you know that's not it. Our freeways are so congested
that we can't get up enough speed to kill anybody and that's why we have
the lowest. We need to look at statistics with an eye as to what these
things mean.

Where do we go wrong? Our airport operations say, "Of course they are
wrong." But we need to think of it in terms of what's an acceptable
risk. Just the other day, we had a conversation. Let's look at this
taxiing to position hold. The NTSB says we got to get rid of it in
nighttime low visibility conditions. Do we really need to do that? Well,
an air trafficker pulled out, looked at all the runway incursions in the
last three years, over 400 of them, how many more directly attributable
to an aircraft holding in position-about 20. On one hand you can say 20
out of 400 out of how many operations? Case closed. On the other hand,
you can say 20 cases where it was real close, sometimes within 130 feet
of each other. We have already said we don't want any deaths due to
runway incursions. We want to lower the rate of As and Bs. We've got to
do something about that. Who's correct? It depends. It depends on your
perspective. From the runway safety office standpoint, their bottom line
is, "Today's level of risk is not acceptable. We need to do something
about it." However, it will always be safer sitting, holding us on the
end of the runway than it is driving your car to the supermarket.

Given yes, it is safe, but our focus is where we can do better. Where do
people go wrong? This is what controllers tend to do when they make a
mistake. And, again, not that they do it often, but when these things
happen, this is what tends to happen. They tend to forget things. They
forget about a clearance they issued to land or taxi in position hold.
They forget about an aircraft that's on approach or holding in position.
They get distracted. Distractions cloud memory. They get distracted by
things that happen rarely like somebody falling down the stairs or a
bird crashing into the tower. They get distracted, and this is going to
sound odd, by other duties. Recording delay times. Get a machine to do
that. My opinion is that a controller should not be required to do
anything that does not directly improve their awareness of the surface
operations. Recording delay times should be done by somebody else or a
machine. That's only one of my soap boxes and, believe me, I have too
many to get stuck on that one.

They don't coordinate local and grounds. They don't catch read-back
errors. Catching read-back errors is an extremely difficult task. We all
as humans hear what we expect to hear. Less than 1% of the read-backs of
clearances contain an error. That's phenomenal. The pilots are doing an
incredible job. Most of those read-back errors are caught and corrected.
That's another phenomenal task. You hear what you expect to hear. So, in
all likelihood, you are going to hear what you wanted to hear, but we do
occasionally, most times, catch that mistake and it gets corrected.

We are not going to be able to do anything to improve human memory. We
are not going to be able to do anything to get rid of all distractions.
There are things we can do in terms of structuring their environment and
procedures so that we can help reduce the probability of these kinds of
errors and help correct them. What this says to pilots, when we let
pilots know you cannot read-back sort of a hopeful clearance-I think
this is what he said and if I read it back he will tell me if I'm wrong.
We are not looking for a consensus in the pilot room for the clearance.
They need to know - if there is any doubt whatsoever, you ask. You don't
take a vote. Similarly, it's a surprise to some pilots that while you
are doing your read-back the controller's mind is necessarily on the
next clearance they are going to issue. This is part of the booklet. We
put the pilots and controllers halves in the same book for a reason.
Pilots need to know where controllers are vulnerable and controllers
need to know where pilots are vulnerable. The kind of mistakes they make
and why and the pressures they are subjected to.

What do pilots do wrong? They don't always hold short as instructed. Is
that a surprise to anyone in this room? They get lost in poor visibility
and good visibility. As was brought up earlier today, runway incursions
happen in the same conditions that airport operations happen. They are
predominantly in good visibility, daylight conditions, but the really
dangerous runway incursions, the really close calls on the accidents,
tend to occur more at night and poor visibility. Pilots misunderstand a
clearance and they also act human. Okay, how do we fix it? Well, one
thing we need to do is give them better tools on the ground and in the
air. We talked about airport signs and markings and one of the proposals
that sounds very promising to me. Not only are we interested in
improving in the hold short markings to be more conspicuous, but they
are also proposing to make the line leading up to the hold short point,
the line just before that, the space just before that, a little
different that you know you are approaching a hold short marking and
then have a distinctive marking for the area between the hold short
point and the runway edge so that, even if you have crossed it and blown
through it, you will know because you can look down and it will be
different. I think that's important, but we also need to realize that
will not help a whole lot with the really more serious ones where they
think they are cleared onto the runway.

Surface radar at more airports with the data tagged. I fly in and out of
Providence all the time and, if you are not familiar with the December
1999 incident, talk to your neighbor. I'm sure they are.

Pilots do not know what airports have ASDE and don't have ASDE. They
don't know what airports have AMASS and don't have AMASS. They are
likely to assume that the controller can see them in good visibility and
poor visibility. They need to know that is not the case.

Improving communication. We need to do something to help relieve
frequency congestion because, on the one hand, we are telling pilots if
you have any questions you need to ask. On the other hand, we have
places where a read-back is considered impolite because the frequency is
too congested. Something needs to be done about that.

Blocked communication. Another one of my soap boxes. There exists
technology that you can put in the cockpits and radios today to
eliminate blocked communication. When they key the mike, they hear the
transmission they would have stepped on. They can override that if it's
an emergency, but more likely they will not. They will hear it and they
will wait a second. That is implemented in three European Airlines. It
was not required. They must have thought it was cost effective. We need
to look at that.

How do we fix it? A lot of this is in progress. The airport specific
analyses to determine the hot spots are highly effective when this
information is passed along to pilots. It also helps us as researchers
because we are trying to determine what makes a hot spot a hot spot. We
need to identify these things so that we don't keep designing airports
with the same hot spots. We also need to improve the way runway
incursions are reported and recorded. We mentioned that not all of what
we would consider runway incursions is by definition a runway incursion.
For example, because the separation wasn't technically lost. But that is
important information too that we need to be able to look at. We talked
about better tools. This includes runway status lights and a lot of
stuff that was already discussed. Cockpit moving maps didn't come up and
I can hear the

ch-ching ch-ching, especially as you add the other traffic and the
clearance limits with data link. If every cockpit had a moving map in it
that displayed the other traffic and their clearance limit, you can
envision what effect this would have on the pilots' deviation-caused
runway incursions.

What can we do on the controller side? Memory aids. Like I said, there
is nothing we can do short of maybe Gingko Over 50 to improve a person's
memory. All we can do is give them better tools, better memory aids that
are more consistently used to help them remember the critical events.
You may have received, you better have received, a survey asking you to
identify the memory aids used at your facility. That's the only way that
clever ideas at one facility is going to be shared. The really good
ideas, the cream is going to rise to the top and we're going to spread
it around so that we can get things. There are homemade devices out
there to record delay times. One guy used to work in the supermarket,
got the barcodes. They have barcoded delay times so nobody has to run
them down, you just feed them through the machine. Those are the kinds
of things that are not standardized, they're homemade and you need to
get the really good ideas in wider use.

Position in hold. Don't clear an aircraft into position and hold if you
plan on leaving them for more than a minute. This is one of those things
that I know that there are people in this room who can give me a really
good idea as to why this is naïve or operationally stupid. I would love
to hear about it. When we looked at the 20 taxiing to position and hold
induced runway incursions that I told you about, in the events in which
you could identify the times, like from the tape with the time stamped,
the times which aircraft was left in position. In all of them, there was
over 2 minutes between the time the aircraft was told to taxi into
position hold and the time the event happened, the land over, the
whatever. In all of those instances that were saved, they were saved by
one of the pilots involved. The landing pilot, when he heard the other
aircraft cleared into position said, "You might want to wait until we
land on 26 right before you taxi into position and hold."

Keep up your scans. How many times have we heard that? Scan, scan, scan.
Again, it is too easy to assume. I cleared that truck, of course he is
across by now and issue the traffic. When you taxi a guy into position
and hold, you issue the traffic and to the aircraft on approach you tell
them about any aircraft. It's a requirement, but in every one of those
instances that we looked at, the traffic was not exchanged. Was it
caused because the traffic was not exchanged? No. We don't know in how
many cases the traffic was not exchanged and did not result in a runway
incursion. We do know that when you exchange the traffic, it gives the
pilots a heads up and it gives them an opportunity to catch any error
and it reinforces the controllers' memory for the traffic that they just
issued.

Similar call signs. The number one contributing factor to an aircraft
accepting somebody else's clearance is similar call signs. Again, they
are hearing what they want to hear especially if it is take off and
clear to land. We need to give pilots as much information as we can to
help prevent the kinds of mistakes we know will happen.

Pilots' number one complaint -- don't talk to me while I am trying to
land and roll out. The cockpit is noisy, they are busy, they are not
going to be receptive to any taxiing instructions. There is a reason we
say hold short instead of things like don't cross. Negative commands are
the worst things that can come out of your mouth. In the early days of
TCAS in the prototype days, in the first version they had the commands,
the RA's of climb, descend, don't climb, don't descend. In simulation
testing, when pilots were given a don't climb or don't descend, they did
the wrong thing half the time. People hear and do the action word and
tend to miss the first syllable.

What pilots can do. The days of listening up for your call signs are
over. You need to listen to all clearances that involve your runway.
Someone brought up earlier that we don't see as many military pilots as
we used to. Something interesting that I just learned recently is the
mindset difference between military pilots and civilian pilots. Civilian
pilots tend to think my runway. I own it. Military pilots tend to think
they share the runway. They are not even renting the runway. They are
just borrowing it for a few minutes. It's a different mindset. So listen
up, look out, don't hold silently and position for more than a minute
unless there is a good reason that you would get by listening up and
look out. Know whether or not you are on a departure only runway. Have
the airport diagram out and in use. Know whether there is another runway
between you and the gate.

One that did not get on the slide but is another one of my soap boxes.
The use of landing lights. Some airlines when they taxi into position
and hold, all the lights go on. Other airlines don't put the landing
lights on until they are cleared for take off. It was standing operating
procedure across all airlines that the landing light went on when they
got the clearance to take off. That would be a signal to other airplanes
that that airplane is moving. If you had a clearance to cross the runway
and the geography was so that you could actually see the plane and the
landing lights, that could be a powerful cue. It's slightly anecdotal,
but the first officer of Pan Am Flight saw the landing lights of the KLM
flight, but they didn't know he was moving until they saw it vibrating
from the motion.

In a large majority of events where things went wrong, one pilot was
listening for the critical clearance, take off, position in hold, cross
through. The other was heads down entering data on the company
frequency. Both pilots on those sensitive areas of the airport need to
be listening for ATC clearances. When they're read back, they should be
read back with the runway designator and the complete call sign. Also,
one that didn't make it, because there are probably not a whole lot of
folks in the room that take intersection departures but, if it is an
intersection departure, that should also be part of the clearance and
the read back because what we see is pilots taxiing into position and
hold. The controller thinks they are full length and they're taxiing
into the intersection.

I almost called this slide what the FAA can do. Then it occurred to me,
there is no such thing as the FAA. There are about twelve different
animals that make up what we call the FAA. There is air traffic, flight
standards, legal folks, safety folks, regional, headquarters. The good
news is, and I don't work for the FAA so you can believe me when I say
this, the runway safety office where John Pallante is the deputy, Bill
Davis is the director, for the first time that office has the rare
combination of the brains and the guts and the funding to actually do
something about this. That's a very rare combination. They might be
smart but they don't want to upset the apple cart or we got to work the
system or they might not have the guts or maybe they don't have the
brains to go on and that doesn't work too well either and they have the
funding. I am really enthusiastic about the changes these folks have
started to make and extremely hopeful for what they can do. Not without
your help and input because it has to come full circle. For those of you
who don't have a lot of confidence in the folks up at 800 Independence
Avenue, actually they are not at 800 Independence Avenue, it's a great
resource and a great tool.

I can't stress this point enough. Even the most well trained,
professional, alert, well rested, conscientious pilots and controllers
can have a runway incursion. I know, I was one. Telling people to pay
attention is not the answer. They are paying attention. They are doing
their best. These things aren't intentional. I know that everybody knows
that, but somehow it escapes us when we talk about the problem. There
was one intentional one with drug runners who stole a plane so there was
no surprise that he took off without a clearance. I'm sure that didn't
bother him a bit. But, by and large, these mistakes aren't happening
because people are complacent. These things happen because people are
human. We can't do 20 things at one time and your environment is
extremely unforgiving of human error. We make mistakes every single day
and a lot of them just don't get caught. They don't have consequences.
We don't even remember them. But on the airport surface environment,
mistakes turn ugly quickly. We can't eliminate human error, but we can
manage it. And how do we do that? Well, we need to structure the
environment in terms of the tower, operations and equipment that we give
pilots and controllers to prevent the errors whenever we can and then to
tolerate the errors that we know are going to occur. We are never going
to eliminate human error so we need to structure the environment so that
when errors do occur they get corrected quickly or at least before they
result in an accident. For example, in all the critical instances that
we talked about with taxi into position and hold, that was a causal
factor, the controller was working combined positions. They didn't issue
the traffic. Sometimes they were too busy and sometimes they just forgot
or didn't think it was necessary. They were working combined positions.
Poor visibility or at night, that is again when it can turn ugly
quickly. We need to look at that. If they are working combined
positions, it's poor visibility or at night, should they be taxiing into
position and hold.

Pilots can catch controller errors just like controllers can catch pilot
errors. We need to do a better job at helping each other detect and
correct those errors. The reason I have automation as a last resort is
automation will never be able to do as good of a job as humans can do.
Automation is like the last fail-safe, the safety net. A machine can
never be as flexible as a thinker. It can't possibly know everything
that the human knows. There is always the trade off between misses and
false alarms. We don't want it to miss the potential accident so that
means you have to design a software so that it catches everything which
means you get a high level of false alarms. With high level of false
alarms, people tend to ignore it or turn it off. It's a really tricky
business to get it right. The humans are definitely our best resource.

At Boeing, they used to say they design their cockpits for the average
pilot on a really bad day. He said they used to say that they would
design that for the below average pilot until he realized that no
airline employs below average pilots even though by definition half of
all pilots are below average.

We need to relieve controllers of the peripheral tasks, as I said. Give
them better equipment, an extra set of eyes in the tower. It doesn't
have to be a supervisor, cab coordinator, local assist -- someone who is
not working another control position. An extra set of eyes goes a long
way to catch these things before they evolve.

Signage and markings. We talked about differentiating the spaces between
the hold short point and the runway edge.

The bottom line is it is a complex problem and requires multidimensional
solutions. Of course, all of our runway incursions are caused by human
error. Brakes don't fail very often. Airplanes don't lose control on
landing very often. All of those systems are a lot more reliable than
the human computer. The dynamics of airport situation, the flight
dynamics, it all conspires to create a very fragile environment.
However, as I said, people are our best resources. There is a lot that
pilots and controllers can do now while we are waiting for that better
equipment to help things. All those ideas are in the booklet. There is a
response card in there to tell us what you thought about it and whether
or not it was helpful and what you would like to see more of or less of
in the future.

We are working on analyzing events to determine causal factors. What
creates a gotcha situation for pilots, what creates a gotcha situation
for controllers. An example of one for pilots is high speed taxiways
with closely spaced parallel approaches. They can run right through
another runway before they know what is going on. We would like to hear
about it. It's all anonymous. We just want to identify what makes for a
hot spot on an airport so that we can do something about them and stop
creating them in the future. I left a lot of time for questions so I
look forward to them. Thank you.

Question:

For as many failures of memory there is a different reason for why it
happened that particular way and that particular time. There are memory
aids for closed runway. Some places will put a piece of paper over the
runway indicator. And in some cases, they lift up the paper, see what
the runway is, issue the wind and clear the guy for takeoff on the
closed runway. Does that happen on purpose? Of course not. So, yes it is
true that not in all cases where the memory aids were available were
they used. In most cases, it was a distraction that caused the memory
lapse. The most fragile part of memory, you can divide it into the
different types of memory. There is the memory for something that
happened a long time ago. That is somantic memory and they think it is
in different places in our brain... The most fragile part of memory is
what they call perspective -- remembering that you need to do something
in the future whether it's a minute in the future or twenty minutes in
the future. The longer that time interval, the more vulnerable it gets.
That's another reason why you want to minimize the time that you know
somebody is going to be sitting in position on the runway. The longer
that time is, the more opportunity there is for a distraction to come in
and wipe it out. So distractions are the number one identifiable reason
why somebody would forget something in the tower. Again, it gets back to
we can't do away with all distractions so what do we do? There is no
silver bullet to the memory thing. In all those instances where somebody
forgot something is almost a unique event. The only common factor is
that they forgot something.

Question:

Yes. In the bigger city that we did, we saw the numbers up there, the
256 operational errors. It did look at how long the controller was on
position before the operational error took place. The numbers were
pretty strong that they tended to occur in the first ten minutes of
assuming the position. Now, that's assuming that when that number is
filled in, how long were they in position when this happened. It's
assuming that is correct. I don't know about that. You've got to tell
me.

Another curious thing is if that is the case, then there is also a flag
to check whether or not they thought the position briefing was involved
in that and that wasn't checked nearly as often. It's like 30% of them
were involved in the first ten minutes of assuming the position. Now, if
you really want to do a rigorous risk assessment, you need to look at a
comparative frequency distribution for how long they're on position and
when those runway incursions happened. It looks like you already have
another question.

Question: I was also wondering how many hours in a day in an eight hour
shift?

That wasn't looked at. Time on position. That's one of those things that
can mean a lot of different things. It could point to a poor position
relief briefing. In one operational error, one guy cleared the aircraft
into position and hold intending to get them to take off before he left
on his break, but left on his break and he was there.

Question: A big part of the nature of our business right from when we
first start is the expediency, whether it be the runway occupancy time
or trying to get people to stay on schedule or record a delay whether it
be in the radar room or the tower. Do you see that as a key common
thread through most everything that we do?

I think everybody is well aware there is an efficiency safety trade-off.
There always is, there always was and there always will be. Again, it is
what level of risk are you willing to accept. Where it gets tricky, and
I think where we can make the improvement, is that people need to
understand that yes, efficiency is a goal. It is not the number one
goal. Capacity is not the number one goal. It's very tricky, but we
shouldn't be trying to feed airplanes in through the mill like some kind
of piecemeal. You don't get paid by the airplane or paid by the
clearance. It's a fine line, but there are safety cultures that differ
from airport to airport and I think that is where the message can come
in like sort of changing the culture of the days of how many airplanes
you can juggle and whoever can juggle the most wins. No, that's not
going to work anymore. I know that's a lousy answer to a good question.
Is it part of the problem? Absolutely. As it was mentioned, I am on the
board of directors of air traffic controller association, which is an
industry group. It's Raytheon, it's IBM and it's all those guys. When it
was their opportunity to provide input into whether or not LaGuardia
should have capacity limits and, as an industry group, they would say
"Heck no, we don't want capacity limits. Don't give us capacity limits.
And, oh, by the way, if you do have to impose capacity limits, make sure
it's the highest number of aircraft for everyone in and out of that
airport at any point. That should be the limit." I'm a human factor
safety person so like time out. Yes, I am sorry. Dissenting opinion. I
do think there should be capacity limits. If what we are doing isn't
working, we need to revisit how we are doing things. If there is a
capacity limit, it shouldn't be the point where the system is strained
to the max and you're asking for trouble.

Question: We talk a lot about distractions when we do investigations. We
see it this way. Our business is safety and no margin for error. That's
it. And not everyone can do it. So when it comes to distractions, there
are different kinds of distractions. We don't call them operational
distractions. Either you set your priorities, it was a bad judgment of
priorities. You went to this priority. You felt it was a priority to
listen to Mark ask me about manual leave. Or I went to Les over here
because he asked me about, "Hey, you want to switch on next Tuesday?"
And I turned around. That's not a distraction. That's a bad judgment of
priorities because I had air traffic over here. You see the way we see
it. We all know that to create a distraction in the control tower in the
radar room is not acceptable but we do it. Now is that human factor or
is that negligence. Not negligence in the sense of criminal. It's
something we have to draw the line once you cross that door.

But the hard part is, it's like Monday night quarterbacking. Yes, it's
easy to see in hindsight how it was poor judgment to attend to this
instead of that. The problem was, in that split second, it doesn't seem
like bad judgment. You're responding to a question. There are a lot of
cases, and there is actually one study, fortunately it didn't get
printed, where they listed... The controller was performing one duty and
they missed something else over here. It could have been issuing a
clearance to this aircraft, but they missed something over there. They
call that a distraction. That's not a distraction. That's what you're
supposed to be doing. In hindsight, of course they would have done it
differently. If in hindsight, you wouldn't have done it differently. I
wouldn't call that poor judgment because at the moment there was no
indication. There was most likely no indication that it was poor
judgment to attend to that and the effect was that you missed something
over there. We have to structure the duties so that those sorts of
distractions are minimized. It gets back to combined positions and those
sorts of things. When you do combine positions, depending on what
positions you are combining, what does that do to the field of view that
single person needs to cover? It depends on the positions you're
combining. It depends on the airport that you are talking about. It
depends on a lot of things. We have never looked at those sorts of
things. When we think in terms of distractions, that's one of the things
we need to look at. Not so much why did the person attend to this
instead of that and was it good or bad judgment, but what is it about
the duties that you're asking that person to perform that may lend
themselves to making the wrong choice. Attention is something that you
only have so much control over. Your attention is automatically going to
be attracted to something and those factors are not in your control. We
need to look at what we are asking these people to do, both the cockpit
and the tower side.

Question: I was glad to see you mention surface radar. Do you have a
feeling what difference it would make if all tower controllers had
surface radar? Do you have statistics on that?

I have statistics that I put together. I don't know how good they are.
The reason I say that is when we analyze incidents we did look at,
because we were asked to, if that airport had better equipment -- it
could have been radar, AMASS -- would it have made a difference. So,
yea, we have those numbers but, again, it's very difficult to tell. Now
surface radar in itself is sort of a no-brainer. If you can't see the
airplane in poor visibility, that's a totally different ballgame with
and without the radar. Like I said, I'm from Providence so nobody can
feel more strongly about this than me. The other point is we need the
data tags. Controllers misidentify aircraft. That's one of the things
that go wrong. We need the data tags on there so they can see who is
who. Dr. Cardosi is my brother. He can take out an appendix but not a
human one and not in the book.

Question: I have a question about how we recently got some conflicting
guidance between the combining and decombining positions, but keeping
the activity level on position to where the controllers are engaged in
what is going on and not getting bored with the position. Have you done
any studies on that for the difference? No studies have been done. I am
not familiar with the guidance that you are referring to. It sounds like
it might have been regional. Let me just speak in general terms. There
is one good thing about combined positions. You only have to coordinate
with yourself. On the other hand, if you are only coordinating with
yourself, there is no other person to help catch something that you
might overlook. The only thing that is probably infallible to say on the
topic, because it needs to be looked at further, as I said combined
positions isn't one animal. It depends on what airport you are talking
about, the operations, what positions you're combining, what other
positions are being staffed at the time, environmental conditions,
night, day, visibility, those sorts of things. Does a low level of work
load induce complacency? That's got to be pretty low especially in the
tower. In the cockpit, it's a little different because there are long
periods where there is not a whole lot to do, over the pond kind of
thing. Certainly not on the ground where we are. It's got to be pretty
low. Sometimes you will hear that there are more operational errors in
periods of low to moderate workload. When you look a little deeper, it's
the workload was high and then it dropped and that's sort of the gotcha
because you've been pushing it and pushing it and you're at 110% and
then it's (sigh) okay. And then it hits. We need to be careful when we
look at low workload or high workload. What happened just before?

Question:

The study that we are in progress, where we hope to feed all these
things in, all the comments and suggestions and that sort of thing will
help determine where we look in terms of causal factors and remedies.
That is most likely going to take the better part of a year. The better
news, in terms of the survey of the memory aids and things the towers
have found helpful, that is a smaller component of the bigger picture
and that will get turned around faster. I am trying to remember the
schedule. I think the deadline for sending in the surveys was the end of
this month. Don't let that stop you, by the way. If you haven't filled
it in and you still have it, go ahead and send it in. I promise it will
get looked at. It does take a while. The quick and dirty studies aren't
the ones that tell you a whole lot. We are taking the time to really
milk the data. In terms of when will it come out and how would you get
it, just keep sending me e-mails. That's another tough one. This booklet
was preceded by a regular government report, pilot and controller errors
and surface operations, a review of previous whatever, an analysis of
safety data. Nobody reads those things. That's why this came out. In the
government reports, in 50 pages there's probably 5 lines that's real
useful to you. That's why this sort of thing came out. You've just got
to keep bugging the right people.

Paul: Kim, I think you did an excellent job there and I think we should
all give Kim a big hand.

Thursday, May 30, 2002

RUNWAY INCURSION PREVENTION

Vic Nartz

Runway incursions is a very important subject to all of us here
obviously and, from looking at the attendance list outside, we cover a
broad range of people from the industry of aviation. Mark Twain once
said, "It is not best that we should all think alike. It's a difference
of opinion which makes horse races." We're not looking today, I think,
to get everybody into one mindset on how to resolve the runway incursion
issue. We are looking for differences of opinion. Every airport is
unique and will take a unique set of corrective actions to reduce your
runway incursions. I have been asked to tell you a little bit about what
we have been doing at D/FW over the years to improve our runway
incursion situation. Following the national runway incursion summit in
the year 2000, we developed this policy and supported that national
effort to reduce runway incursions. Initially, I will call your
attention to this second bullet here where we talk about encouraging
accelerated technologic efforts. We have been trying to do that. It's
already been mentioned the runway status light project that we are
looking very much forward to and hosting a field demonstration of that
next year. I won't say much on it because Jaime is going to cover that
and I think you are going to be very much impressed.

The second item in that bullet was accelerated deployment of AMASS.
Well, I can't say that we have done much in that regard. AMASS has been
a long time in coming. It is on the horizon. It does appear that the
tower is going to receive an operational system this fall, but it is not
anything like it was originally intended to be, but it should be a good
runway incursion prevention tool for the controllers.

The first bullet -- a couple of things in there. Preventing runway
incursions and surface incidents is the responsibility of everyone. Down
in the third one -- runway safety is a shared commitment. When we talk
about everyone, we talk about the FAA, the airports, pilots,
controllers, airlines and unions. We put that group together with the
help of the FAA into the D/FW Runway Action Safety Team. This team meets
quarterly. It is co-chaired both by the FAA and the airport showing that
cooperation. It takes that cooperative spirit and commitment by all
parties if we're going to resolve this runway incursion situation.

D/FW, like most airports, is unique. I don't think there is an airport
operator around here who doesn't think his airport is unique. That
uniqueness comes with both benefits and curses. In our cases, we've got
a lot of property. One of our benefits is our physical layout does not
necessitate airline operations, putting vehicles on our taxiways or
crossing our taxiways or in any way of the movement area. The curse
comes from the fact that, because of our layout, we have over 1,700
runway crossings by aircraft daily. That's a significant potential for
runway incursions.

Here are some of the efforts we have done to reduce runway incursions.
First of all, escorts. Since we don't have a real requirement for
airlines to be out on the movement area, we seriously restrict those
people that have free access to that area. If it's not a board employee
that has business on the airfield, such as maintenance, airfield
operations or Department of Public Safety, or an FAA person such as
airways facilities needing to be out there to maintain air equipment,
they are all escorted on the AOA by airfield operations.

We established driver training programs and familiarization training and
we do that on a recurring basis. Additionally, in that regard, because
the tower operators don't always foresee the problems on the airfield
the same way as vehicle operators, we conduct a familiarization program
for the tower operators to come down in that airfield operations vehicle
and see what it looks like down on the surface rather than 200 feet in
the air. That has proven to be very beneficial.

We just embarked on a SMGCS driver training, Surface Movement Guidance
Control System, and low visibility operations. We expect to have our
SMGCS plan implemented early next year, but we have already started on
this driver training specifically addressing those issues that vehicle
operators will encounter on the airfield in low visibility conditions.
Once again, we restrict the number of people who are going to be out
there in low visibility conditions even more so than we do normally. In
addition to that, we have embarked on an operation to install compasses
in our airfield operations vehicles, specifically for the support of the
SMGCS operation. In low visibility, if somebody gets lost, a compass can
help. That is just one of the ways we come up with for ways to try to
improve our runway incursion situation by reducing them and providing
the drivers with better situational awareness.

Snow and ice is not an event that we have very often here and, when it
happens, it's a unique experience for D/FW each year. We try to reduce
the impact of that by conducting training between airfield operations
and maintenance early in the fall. In that training, we practice the
communications, the coordination, the procedures that we will be using
on the airfield for snow and ice removal and control. That, we feel, has
done quite a bit in reducing our potential for runway incursions and
having aircraft on runways that are still occupied by vehicles.

We also provide AOA training to mechanics who have occasion to taxi
aircraft on D/FW. That's over 800 American mechanics and over 150 Delta
mechanics. For those of you who may not be aware, if a mechanic is
taxiing an aircraft, and they are involved in a runway incursion, it
doesn't go as a pilot deviation or a controller error, it goes as
vehicle incursion. We are reviewing and developing, in conjunction with
the tower, and the tower has the primary lead on this. They are
developing standard taxi routes for mechanics for taxiing on the
airfield. They will have a familiar route that will be the same each
time as much as possible. We have construction on the airport and that
is not always going to be possible. Providing them with a standard taxi
route, they know what to expect, they know where to stop, they know
where to expect clearance from and it's going to make it much easier for
them. Any ground personnel that are involved in a runway incursion are,
of course, retrained. We have not had any of those for some time. Knock
on wood.

Installing additional runway holding position signs and yellow strobe
lights at various locations. Many years ago when we opened up the west
diagonal runway, that's primarily used as an arrival runway in south
flow conditions. Significant amount of volume. In order to get from that
runway to the terminal areas, you've got to cross two runways, 18 Right
and 18 Left. As they approach 18 Right, it's an uphill slope and the
perception of the pilot is that he is really not coming up on a runway
and the pilots were losing their awareness that they were coming up on a
runway and missing the holding position. So we installed runway holding
positions on both sides of the runways and, to further enhance that, we
placed some amber strobes on top of those signs to better bring the
pilots' attention to the fact that he is coming up on a runway. And
those have been fairly successful in that location. We also installed
runway holding position signs on entrances to the runway on high-speed
exits. This was before they were required by the sign regulations.

This is 13 Right arrival and this is the intersection here where we put
the double signs and the strobes. We have also put those double signs in
one place on the east side based on our experience as a new taxi way. We
wanted to solve some problems before they happened. Back in the 1980s,
we used to have grass areas between the terminal ramps on the east side
and the first taxiway. In order to get more ramp space and improve the
operation, we filled those in with concrete. Initially the pilots had
the perception that they weren't on the first taxiway until they passed
the first grass area. If they were told to go to the second taxiway,
several of them ended up on the runway. We have a cure for that. We had
double sign K to prevent that from happening at that location since it
was a new taxiway. We did put the strobes on, signs along that runway as
well to better call the pilots' attention that that is a runway.

On roadways where they intersect a runway, either at the end or
crossing, we have added these hold for tower clearance signs plus the
location of the vehicle and the runway involved. These are on our
emergency roads, on the FAA roads and we have also painted the yellow
yield signs on roadways where we can't put the normal erected sign
inside the taxiway safety area. Both have proven fairly effective.

Primarily, the signs on the roadways, the one you saw is right here on
this roadway leading into the end of the taxiway. We also have them on
an emergency road that crosses the east diagonal and we had them as an
emergency road right through here and it goes off the runway. It really
doesn't cross the runway, it crosses the safety area where we put those
signs there as well and one on the west side. The one on the west side
is gradually going away as we extend those runways. And on the roads
that lead down the light lanes to the ends of the runways just to make
sure the vehicle operators know where they are at. We have implemented a
training video for ramp driving and that is required viewing by all
airline personnel that have occasion to drive on the ramp area.
Construction contractors have to review that, any terminal contractors,
people providing services or deliveries to the terminals, anyone who has
to drive on the AOA.

If we go back one slide, while we are on the subject of vehicles, our
last vehicle runway incursion was in 1997. A vehicle was coming in to
service the vending machines. Came up to the south gate to Terminal E
and asked the guard where the Delta hangar was. Well, the Delta hangar
is over here. So being new on the job, in fact the regular guy was on
vacation and this was a substitute, he took the quickest route between
two points. Out he goes across two runways and four taxiways to get to
the Delta hangar. We were very fortunate it was late at night. We had no
departures in progress and the nearest arrival was about three miles on
the final. We don't want to see that one happen again, believe me.

We implemented airport news, the Triple AE network. We use air testing
criteria for this for movement area driver familiarization training. We
are using resources on a national basis.

Installing only amber and green lights on high-speed exits. Of course,
this is the color coding of the taxiway lights now required. It allows
the pilots to know when they are clear of the object free zone so they
don't stop short and cause a problem behind them. Early on, though, we
changed the high-speed exit lights that were normally bi-directional to
unidirectional so they are only visible as the pilot exits the runways.
So anyone coming up on a runway doesn't get a light clue that it's a
usable taxiway. Now that has not been fully fool proof. One of our most
recent runway incursions involved an aircraft that taxied across the
runway, made a right turn and went right back on the runway by the high
speed exit. So it's not fool proof, but it helps.

For runway closures, we utilize this highly visible trailered X and we
use it at both ends of the runway to make sure we don't have anybody
landing or taking off on a closed runway. One point about this one. The
FAA standard is that the X should be positioned over basically the
identification number on the runway. With our situations of taxiways at
D/FW, we have quite a few runway ends where we have dual taxiways at the
ends and those would continue to be used during a runway closure. We
couldn't put the X very well in between them. So the alternative FAA
position was, if you can't do that, you put it on the blast pad. Well,
that doesn't block an aircraft from taking that runway and taking off so
we deviate a little bit from that. We put it on a runway side of the two
taxiways to make sure we block that from any aircraft taking off on that
runway.

For runway closures less than an hour, and those are primarily in the
daytime at D/FW, we station an operations person and vehicle out at the
approach end of the runway with the vehicle pointed out final approach
course. They monitor the air traffic communications. They watch the
final approach course and, by the way, we have outfitted those vehicles
with the police flashing headlights so they are more visible in these
operations. They are out there as a safety device to make sure no
aircraft lands on that closed runway.

We mentioned before that we co-chair with the FAA the quarterly meetings
of the runway safety action team. It is important to reemphasize that
this is a partnership. We co-chair because we have a partnership with
the FAA. We have a co-interest in reducing runway incursions. I don't
want to diminish the participation of the airlines and the controllers
and all the rest of the people in that runway safety team. It takes
everybody to make this happen. We constantly are coming up with very
interesting discussions especially on what we should do to further
enhance our runway incursion situation at D/FW.

After every runway incursion, we come together and we discuss it. We
analyze what happened and we try to come up with corrective actions that
are legitimate to prevent those from happening again. That's all part of
the small group of the runway incursion action team. One of those
suggestions some time ago was to develop a chart showing the hotspots on
the airport. We have very few GA aircraft that come into D/FW so they
are generally unfamiliar. We started posting that down in the GA
terminal. Through the help of Paul Erway, he developed some large
posters for us and a pamphlet as well. That is distributed at the
general aviation terminal, but more recently it has also been
distributed and posted in the airline pilot lounges in the terminals so
they have access to that as well.

Another thing we are working on is - the runway safety action team is
discussing the possibility of coming up with a means to publish our
runway incursion hotspots on the Jeppesen charts. Probably the best way
to get the information to the pilots is to put it on a Jeppesen chart.
Chicago is ahead of us on that. I'm sure their format fits their needs
but it doesn't necessarily fit ours so we are working through that to
see if we can come up with a means that properly suits D/FW's needs.

How many airport operators do we have in the room? You look familiar.
All airports are required to widen their hold bars 12" now. That has to
be done by the end of September. We are in the process of doing that. We
jumped out smartly early on as a recommendation of the team for specific
locations on the airport to widen those to reduce our runway incursion
potential but, with 117 hold bars on our airport, that is more of a task
than our maintenance department could take on so we are doing that in
conjunction with our SMGCS implementation project.

Obviously, this marking is a problem. We came up with a national
standard to widen the hold bars to increase their visibility to pilots.
There was a gentleman at Hobby several years ago, Ernie Hall, back in
the early 1990s. We had meetings going around to all the airports.
Runway incursion was a hot topic. He really started thinking out of the
box down there, in my estimation. His logic was this -- all runway paint
markings are white. Correct? All taxiway paint markings are yellow.
Runway holding positions signs are red and white. If we are trying to
tell a pilot he is coming up on a runway, why are we using a yellow
line? Why? Shouldn't it be red and white? So when you come to your
discussions later on today about recommendations, keep that one in mind
for me. I still think it is a golden idea that hasn't gotten anywhere.

Several years ago, tower implemented standard taxiway routes for most of
the airlines at D/FW, but they have to have a letter of agreement with
the airline to do it, but that has been a tremendous aid in reducing
runway incursions and the primary benefit was to reduce communications
and it does that very well. By doing that, it allows the controllers to
put more attention to what is going on in the airfield. We outlined
runway holding position markings in black before as a requirement. We
started using beaded paint to help identify the runway holding position
bars.

Now, let's look into the future. I mentioned our SMGCS project which is
just getting under way. We are installing runway guard lights, painting
the 12" wide center lines along the SMGCS routes and widening the hold
bars. This is essentially that project. But that's not the important
thing for today. The important thing is the runway guard lights were
designed for low visibility operations. However, we will be using those
lights being on 24 hours a day 7 days a week as a runway incursion
prevention measure to better identify that the pilot's coming up to the
runway. If you have ever seen those, they are very bright.

We are very much interested in a vehicle tracking system. In our vision,
that vehicle tracking system is a two way system. One that would provide
vehicle identification and location to the tower to the ASDE coming up
and also a back feed to the vehicle to provide an oral and visual
warning that they were approaching an active runway. That technology is
available and we made the first cut of an Air 21 Cost Share program
recently. Unfortunately, we had to back out because we couldn't come up
with our 2/3 share of the cost. Finances at D/FW at the present time are
strained to the limit with post 9/11 situation. We have so many
operational commitments we couldn't come up with the needed funds to do
that. Hopefully, we can readdress that later.

Reviewing the use of perimeter taxiways to reduce runway incursions.
This means a pilot landing on a rival runway won't have to cross another
runway to get to the terminal. He goes around the end. That's going to
take longer. Yea, it will take longer but, if your volume goes up, it is
actually shorter than holding to cross a runway and doesn't interrupt
the departure flow. A side benefit in most conditions we have shown in
simulations that there is capacity increase. Remember how we talked
about benefits and curses of each airport. We happen to have land to do
this with. Some airports will not have that. We are monitoring very
closely with the AVSTAR program. We saw this concept of putting airport
situational awareness in the cockpit here at D/FW in the fall of 2000
when NASA demonstrated their runway incursion prevention system. There
is a display in the cockpit that shows the pilot the location of all the
aircraft on the airport that gives him alerts when he is approaching a
runway that is unsafe to occupy -- it has an aircraft on final, that
sort of thing. We also mentioned AMASS. It's not up here. We are hoping
to see that by October. As a matter of fact, as I leave here I am going
to a meeting on AMASS and I will find out what the schedule is today.

One final item is runway status lights. Jaime is going to cover that. We
are very excited about that program. It provides a means to notify the
pilot, sort of a last chance, that it's not safe to cross or takeoff on
that runway. It requires no controller involvement so we take the human
factors out of that. It may be good or it may be bad, I'm not sure. They
are going to be running some shadow tests hopefully this fall on the
computer. If their error rate is such that it looks like it is a
feasible system, we will hopefully be field testing that next year at
D/FW.

I'm going to leave now to go up to an AMASS meeting, but if anybody has
any questions I would be happy to take them now. That's surprising, but
thank you very much.

TECHNOLOGY UPDATE

Jaime Figueroa

I appreciate the opportunity to participate today and share with you
some of the work we are doing in Washington. We are doing quite a bit of
work on the technology end for runway safety. I lead a team that was
specifically formed a little over a year ago to focus exclusively on
exploration and evaluation of technologies that could be applied to
mitigate the runway incursion problem. More specifically, we are looking
at tools that enhance situational awareness both for the tower and the
pilots. Runway incursion prevention and evaluating the effectiveness of
a tool and delivering that service is difficult because of the
sparseness of the data. As was said yesterday, we have a very good
safety record. Just to put it into perspective for you -- a bad runway
incursion airport, one that is problematic, shows an incursion per
100,000 operations. Statistically, that is insignificant so it is a real
challenge for us doing R&D to take a look at intervention, characterize
it and make some determination of the effectiveness. It is very hard to
put in place a before and after picture with those kinds of statistics.

As was mentioned yesterday, even though the data is sparse and we have a
great safety record, we still have on the order of one category A or B a
week. Those category A's and B's are events that could potentially
develop into an incident, a collision. We can't rest on the fact that
statistically performance is great. Any one of those events that could
develop into an incident has to be avoided. So we continue to explore
technological avenues.

My group works very closely with the runway safety office. I'm not sure
if John Pallante is here today, but I would like to say that we are
joined at the hips. We meet regularly. They own the larger program and
we try to make sure that what we are doing on a day to day basis aligns
with the overall program objectives from a technology standpoint.

Let me offer this picture as just a framework to describe the variety of
projects that we have going on. We have received numerous
recommendations from the oversight agencies -- the IG, NTSB, congress,
etc. about what to do about runway incursion prevention. I think most of
us are probably familiar with those. A common theme that comes out of
all these reports that we receive fairly regularly are two things. From
the technological standpoint, we need to put more emphasis and focus
more on developing tools and aids for the cockpit. We have programs
underway in the acquisition like AMASS and ASDE-X which are focused on
delivering aids to the tower. Those will run its course and will prove a
benefit there. Up until now we have placed little emphasis on tools that
deliver information almost real time to the cockpit. You will see that
we are exploring different kinds of visual guidance tools or other types
of pilot aids.

Similarly, one of the recommendations that has come up constantly is
what are we doing about the non-ASDE and non-AMASS airports? If you take
a look at what we have underway right now, we will have ASDE-X and AMASS
at 34-35 airports will have this and 25 more airports. What about the
other 400+ passenger service airports, some of which are fairly high
incursion rate airports. I'm talking about airports like Long Beach,
California or Las Vegas. No surface radar capability and none planned at
this point. Part of the thrust is we are looking for solutions for
non-ASDE airports. On the left side of the oval, you will see that we
have a whole research area with surface movement sensors. Any
satisfactory runway incursion prevention tool or aid begins with good
surveillance. You need to know what is moving around on the airport
surface. We have that base covered pretty adequately. Airports will have
surface radar or ASDE program. There are a number of other airports that
will not have that capability. However, we may not need a total surface
radar capability to address the problems specific to those airports.
There are some airports where localized surveillance may be sufficient
so we are looking at alternative sensors to go and provide that input
that any runway incursion prevention application be it visual or
audible, whatever it may need. You will see a body of work around
surface movement sensors.

Lastly, I want to touch on some infrastructure projects that we have.
Much has been said over the past couple of days about the work going on
at D/FW and I just want to echo that. It has been a very good
partnership. That's helping us move forward and identify technological
solutions. D/FW has served as our principle test bed for exploring what
can be done with improved surveillance and applications. Presently, we
are upgrading a surveillance infrastructure at D/FW. For those of you
who may not know, much of the early R&D work that eventually lead to the
ASDE-X procurement was done at D/FW. We deployed our prototype
multilateral systems and became acquainted with fusing secondary
surveillance with ASDE surveillance and eventually got smart enough to
go into industry and so began the ASDE-X program. That left us with an
infrastructure there, those prototype assets that serve as a base toward
the acquisition which we have continued to use and leverage and we are
now upgrading with the actual ASDE-X production contract assets. I just
want to emphasize how well this partnership has worked. We are presently
upgrading that to an ASDE-X production quality system entirely funded by
the D/FW airport. This was done out of the Air 21 context. For those of
you familiar with Air 21, there is a cost share process where the
airport and the FAA could share an investment. At D/FW, we did that
ahead of Air 21. D/FW funded 100% of that infrastructure upgrade so I
thought that was significant.

At D/FW, we deployed several years ago a multilateration surface
surveillance system which was a precursor to the ASDE-X that is now in
acquisition. We are currently operating that test bed. We are upgrading
it. In the near term, later this summer, we will have totally upgraded
that and we will have installed everything that we call prototype or
pre-production R&D assets and laid in the exact equipment that the FAA
is otherwise acquiring for the ASDE-X program. D/FW will have this
capability maybe three years ahead of when they would have otherwise had
it through the FAA acquisition. We are using it for a number of things.
One of the benefits that we gain from it is we get an early peek at
ASDE-X in the D/FW community. We are able to support the development of
other runway safety aids like runway status lights and it helps the
ASDE-X program. As we expose this capability to a number of different
operators ahead of its scheduled deployment, we are able to get feedback
as to what works, what doesn't work, what improvements may have to be
laid in when it is time to officially commission D/FW's system. We think
there is a win-win there.

I am not going to walk through the whole thing with you but there is
considerable work going on. Site prep is underway. By the end of this
summer, we will have completed the first phase of that upgrade and we
will have laid in a multi-lateration infrastructure.

Just a quick picture. I wanted to give you a sense of the extent of the
infrastructure at D/FW. The point I want to make is there are a number
of other local operators beyond the FAA that are also preparing to
receive these displays of the surface traffic situation. That is another
community that will be able to give us feedback that we will be able to
incorporate into the ASDE-X program as far as what works and what
doesn't work. To give you a sound byte, when we are all done with this
upgrade, we will have deployed a system with 17 display positions. Three
towers, four local operators, seventeen positions. That's a larger
extent than any of the near term planned ASDE-X deployments.

Here's a picture of what we are able to show presently pre-upgrade to
some of the local operators. This is a display we have in the D/FW
airport authority building. They are starting to get a peak of what
could be reviewed with ASDE-X type capability -- total airport surface
coverage with aircraft ID on the display.

Let me talk about two principle operational enhancements that come from
an ASDE-X type deployment - this kind of a display which includes
aircraft identification not previously available to the tower for
surface traffic. Secondly, ASDE-X consists of this multilateration
surveillance concept merge with legacy as the three surface primary
radar. What that gives you is a highly reliable, highly precise surface
traffic situation picture. Positions of the aircraft and vehicles on the
surface are determined within a few feet. That precision allows us to do
a number of things that we couldn't do before like runway status lights.

Runway status lights is a concept the FAA has been studying for about 10
years. There were some early studies and analysis that came out of our
MIT research laboratory in the 1992-3 timeframe that showed analytically
that this is a viable concept and potentially very effective runway
incursion prevention aid. That led to some field trials in the 1996 and
1997 timeframe up in Boston Logan where again the concept was validated
as something potentially viable. It wasn't sufficient at the time. The
trials done in Boston 5-6 years ago did not go to the next step of
operational implementation because the false alarm rate and the
misdetection rate was something that the use could not accept. That was
a direct result of the quality of the surveillance capability that we
had at that time.

We tested this concept with ASDE3 and AMASS 5-6 years ago and there was
another field try that used a commercial radar product. Neither achieved
the level of performance that would be suitable for an operational
environment. However, all the conclusions were that with some quantum
improvement in the surface surveillance performance that this would be a
potentially viable concept. Roll the clock forward 5-6 years and we now
have this new surveillance concept which we are calling multilateration
fused with primary surveillance and there is the belief that we now
potentially have that level of performance needed to deliver an
operational acceptable runway status light system. I will not describe
the concept while we are here because I have a picture, an animation,
that will show you what it is. Essentially, it is a system of lights
that regulates entry into the runway both from a crossing perspective
and from a takeoff perspective as a function of the technical traffic
situation of the moment.

Here's an animated presentation of the concept. You will see we are
simulating in this picture the lights. These are red bars that light up.
It has two functional features. It has takeoff hold lights which
regulates departure when there is crossing traffic. It clears when the
runway ahead of the departing aircraft is clear for takeoff.

Here's an arrival coming in and, therefore, red lights at the
intersections to the runway turn on.

This is a unique scenario in which the takeoff hold lights -- here's an
incursion in the making, almost simultaneously. The second set of hold
lights prevented the incident there. Again, this is all automatically
driven by logic that takes as input your surface surveillance radar.

Can you challenge implementing runway status lights? It's as important
operationally for the lights to come on at the right time. It's equally
important for them to go off at the right time. We have defined a number
of systems designed and performance parameters that we will measure to
ensure that that operates as such. One of the parameters that we tested
to run baseline during the 1995 trials was this notion of cases of
interference. That is a parameter that derives from lights being on when
they shouldn't be on and thus eliciting an interaction via VHF with the
tower. Tower instructing a clear and a red light going on so the pilot
has to communicate with the tower and say, "Resolve this ambiguity for
me." We count those and we will count those during our planned
operational evaluation because, again, if we don't balance the safety
benefit with the efficiency needs of the operation, the system may be
rendered unusable. It's a key challenge. Again, turning on the lights is
-- I'm not going to say trivial -- but that's only half of the problem.
Getting them to go off at the right time so as not to impede flow is an
equally challenging part.

What are our plans? We have been working with the D/FW airport for the
last year or so trying to plan a fairly substantial operational
evaluation of this concept. This is a bird's eye view of the plan. We
are presently in the middle of phase one which means we are going to
develop these algorithms in the lab, record D/FW specific data, run them
through the algorithms and make sure that they are at the level of
maturity and then we take the next step with them.

Phase two, which we hope to be undertaking some time this fall, is we
are going to bring the assets to D/FW -- the runway status lights and
algorithms and drive them with real time light data. We are still not
going to be turning lights on and off in the airfield. We are going to
simulate that operation on the display screen, what we call shadow mode
operations, and that is just to get the local community acquainted and
build the level of confidence that this will operate as designed. We
will have a decision point out of that at the end, of which, if we have
achieved certain performance thresholds, then we will go into the phase
three when we will actually enable runway status lights at the
intersection points that you see there. Driving and turning lights on
and off in the field. In terms of the fixtures that you will see in the
field, they will be exactly the fixtures that are approved for the SMGCS
implementation. The stop bar fixtures -- we will use that same product
for this application.

Again, what we hope to do is really ring out this application. We are
calling it more than just a field demonstration. We have undergone the
requisite system engineering requirements, definition and testing to get
this to a point where, if we are successful and this operational
evaluation shows it is a viable system, we will have covered 80% of the
territory needed for the FAA to make a decision to go and implement this
system. Again, we are hoping that upon success next year the path to
spreading this throughout the nation will not be as much as it has been
in the past.

I'm going to talk a little bit about BAA. The summit that was held in
2000 came up with ten initiatives which some of you are probably
familiar with.

This team was formed as a result of that initiative. That's what kind of
gave birth to the organization that I lead now. Our first course of
action was to just follow the letter of the recommendation and go out to
industry and issue broad agency announcement to explore, to scan what is
out there, to support the runway incursion prevention. We had an
enormous response, better than 90+ ideas which we had to go through a
process to narrow down to what we thought were high value ideas. Our
thought was to demonstrate the concepts, make a decision as to whether
they were worthy of further exploration and development, and we did
that, and I will summarize to you where we are today. When all was said
and done, we awarded six contracts to demonstrate six different things.
At this point, we have concluded all the demonstrations from that
initial round of contracts. I have two arrows there marking what has
emerged as something potentially beneficial and we have decided to look
at further. In the next briefing, the last item that will probably be
highlighted as something we want to look at further as well, it is not
at this stage because demonstration was concluded fairly recently. We
haven't even finalized the report, but the early returns are that the
work we did at Long Beach is also something we ought to look at for
potential replications for other sites. Let me talk about each of these
that are highlighted.

Ground marker. This is an idea that was offered initially by Erickson,
the cell phone company. Subsequently, they moved on and gave the work to
one of their team partners. The concept over here is to extend your ILS
capability, if you will, to the surface. Presently, as you're on final
approach you have your ILS beacon markers that give you audible tones at
distinct points on the approach pad all the way to almost runway
threshold. Once the aircraft has landed, you have that asset in the
cockpit, that receiver that hears the tones on the 75 megahertz channel
available for other applications. The idea was what if we deploy
necessary ground markers. You have outer marker, middle marker, inner
marker, extend to deliver via the same radio that is already redundant
on the ground audible message, in this case text messages, voice
messages that could be heard over the 75 megahertz receiver. The idea
here is to scale this deployment which we are showing over here by some
ovals in that aerial view to where it is needed. There might be hotspots
in the airport where pilots traditionally get disoriented or confused so
there is an opportunity to put a ground marker low-range transmitter
that would broadcast an advisory in that coverage volume. You pick
whatever the appropriate advisory is. You're on taxiway Charley 1
mid-point or intersection X. It's another opportunity to reinforce or
deliver additional information to the cockpit. It is scalable. It's not
complicated technology. It's a radio transmitter with dipole antenna
imbedded on the airport surface. It's not rocket science. It's something
we are very excited about because it is something we feel could
potentially deliver high value and it is not going to be a huge
multimillion dollar investment either on the FAA or the airport part. We
decided to look at that further. That's just a quick status of where we
are. We conducted some demonstrations at the tech center. It was
reviewed by a variety of FAA stakeholders. All gave it a resounding
thumbs up and highly recommended we pursue it as a situational awareness
enhancement tool.

This is a picture we use just to illustrate where we think something
like ground marker might make a difference. This is Milan six months
ago. GA aircraft was cleared to taxi along R5. They acknowledged the
instruction, Roger R5, and proceeded to taxi out R6. They continued
their taxi operation all the way to the intersection with 36 Right as an
MD 87 was departing. Collision. Over 100 people perished.

We have used that same picture and overlaid it with a hypothetical
deployment of ground marker and the point here was to just illustrate
that in this scenario deployment like this, which was not very dense
deployment, there would have been at least four opportunities for the
air crew on the GA airplane to hear that they were on the wrong path. It
might have made a difference. Again, this is not high tech, it's not
high cost technology. The deployment of this magnitude might be an order
of a few hundred thousand dollars. Maybe another layer of defense. Is it
the silver bullet? Probably not, but it is consistent with the notion
that we need different layers of defense and this might have made a
difference.

One other product that came out of this initial round of BAA
demonstrations was this notion of a Smart Board. It's an electronic
message board that is addressable and re-configurable. You could address
wirelessly and enhance the fixed airport signage. The actual offer that
we got from the company that proposed this idea was broader than just a
message board. In fact, they proposed an electronic flight progress
strip system which was somewhat cumbersome, complicated, required quite
a bit of controller actuation from the tower. It was not desirable. We
drew a box around the message board itself because that seems to be a
reliable way of augmenting pilot situational awareness. We have taken a
step back and said, "What if we could make this an airport worthy
product to be used in different applications." One of them could be just
a fixed message, just an electronic rendition of what is now painted on
the signage. The other concept is one that we think is potentially more
effective and something that is triggered by some form of sensor as
there is approaching aircraft to a region of interest. Somebody is
approaching an intersection, a hot intersection. There is a sensor
detecting that approach and it lights an appropriate awareness message.
You are coming up on an active runway. You are coming up on a hold bar.
Whatever the appropriate message is. Again, this is another one of those
low hanging fruits. This is not high tech. This is a couple of pedigree
above just a flip chart on the field but it could be potentially
effective. It is something that could serve the needs of the non-ASDE
airports that need some kind of intervention and do not have a
comprehensive surface surveillance system.

Just a quick status of where we are with this. We did the demos. We are
currently developing the plan of action for further testing, eventually
to a field operational evaluation. We were called a few months ago by
the Tyson McGee Airport in Knoxville, Tennessee. They have a hotspot
problem. They also don't have a surface radar, nor is there one planned.
We reviewed their situation and it appeared that their problem could be
mitigated to some extent by an application of electronic messages at
their hotspots. We kind of formed a marriage because we are ringing this
product out of the tech center right now and our next step is to take it
to an operational site for some field tests to get some operational
effectiveness feedback. We will probably be doing that in Knoxville,
Tennessee at the end of this year.

Long Beach is another one of our test beds for a variety of surface
technology products. I am not elaborating too much on what is at Long
Beach. I wanted to focus more on D/FW. Let me just say that we are
testing a variety of concepts, specifically those that do not depend on
ASDE3, AMASS or ASDE-X. What we did at Long Beach several years ago was
to deploy an infrastructure of inductive loop sensors along the length
of their principle runway and we tried to arrange them such that it
would give us a fairly continuous trap of aircraft moving above that
runway. Having done that, we have discovered a number of other
applications that we could do with that infrastructure besides just
painting a display of the surface traffic situation to the tower. For
example, recently, and this is that 6VA8 project that I told you we
don't have a blue arrow next to yet. We tested the runway status lights
concept, this time driven by inductive loops as the source of surface
movement. The returns on that were shaky. The deployment of inductive
loops at Long Beach was not initially done such that it could support
these applications or envision two years after the fact. What we have
shown is that inductive loops at the element level are a very reliable
source of surface movement detection. The question is how many do you
need to deploy to have a clean track, to make them look like a radar. We
have been using it for a number of applications including doing runway
status lights. What we are going to be doing later this summer, since we
have the main runway encapsulated with loops, we are able to detect
aircraft moving in specific regions of the runway. We will test a
concept whereby we do different blinking patterns on the position
approach path indicator, the PAPI lights, to signify to approachers that
the runway ahead is occupied. It's an idea that came out of the GA
community. We looked at it and it appeared worthwhile to explore the
concept to see if that could be done in a viable way. We are using Long
Beach for our test scenario for that, but it is something that could
potentially propagate to other sites. All you need is good surface
surveillance. We are trying it at Long Beach with inductive loop
surveillance sweep. It could work at sites we have ASDE surveillance as
well. We will probably get some returns on that later in the year.

Omaha. Part of the other products we learned about was light emitting
diodes, a packing of leads that you could imbed in the surface to
enhance painted markings. In this case, we are using a lead product
billed by a company called Hilltech to overlay the painted hold bar
markings and enhance them in conditions of low visibility, either at
night or when they are wet. Similar application is the message board.
You sense aircraft approaching a hold bar and you illuminate the LEDs to
bring out the yellow. Maybe it will be bring up the red in the future.
It is something that the Omaha Airport is sponsoring and they want to
see happen so we are working with them with the Runway Safety Office to
implement a field operational evaluation of that concept to see to what
extent this could be another aid for situational awareness.

Just a quick picture of the concept here. The little blue box represents
sensors to detect presses of motion vehicles in distinct regions. There
is logic that takes that input and lights up LED strips which are
aligned with the painted markings. Again, the idea is to enhance what is
already painted on the surface during periods of low visibility.

Very briefly, this is another project that we have underway. It is
something called fog eye which uses ultraviolet technology as another
source of surface movement. Congressionally directed. It's something
that I guess has the interest of some people on the hill as another
potentially viable tripwire type sensor application so we will do some
trials on that. The FAA looked at it a couple of years ago and I guess
they put it on the shelf. It found its way back to the FAA with
congressional sponsorship so we are trying to take a fresh look at it
with open eyes to see if it is another cost effective viable surface
movement sensor. We will tell you more about that in the future.

Last summer, June/July timeframe, the OIG issued another one of their
reports on how well we are doing with runway safety and runway incursion
prevention specifically. A number of recommendations, some of which we
had heard before, came out of that report. One that was more specific
this time than it had been in the past was the FIMA and what are you
doing about the non-ASDE, non-AMASS airports. The specific
recommendation was for the FAA to go down the list of top runway
incursion offenders. They gave us some thresholds, airports with more
than X numbers of incursions in this time period. Go and do a review and
analysis and see what technology interventions might be effective. So
that was a recommendation/action to the FAA. Bill Davis accepted it and
he said we would do that. He turned around and asked us to go do this
work. That work is presently underway. We are visiting all those sites
and trying to understand what their causal factors are and what
technology or product or combination of products might fit and make a
difference. We will be generating a report at the end of this year.

Up until now, we have visited about ten sites and of the ten the early
returns are that about three appear to need some type of technology
intervention. Many of the other visits, what we have learned is that
they either have a comprehensive program underway, a non-technology
training or signage procedures that might make a difference so the team
has decided to try to let that work. There are others that need other
non-technological interventions like build a fence on this roadway and
that will cure 80% of your problem. I think Long Beach is in need of
some technological intervention and we are there and we are trying a
number of things which we might eventually operationally deploy. We have
about six more sites to go. I don't see any here that are in your
region, Paul. Lots of Western Pacific region sites and lots of Southern
region sites. I expect that over time this will be a recurrent action
from the IG or NTSB as we do work and potentially satisfy the needs of
both sides. The reaction might be, okay, do the next ten and the next
ten until we have made a difference overall. That is all I've got. If
anybody has any questions, I will be happy to answer them now.

Question:

The answer is yes. One project that we are sponsoring, which has not
fully taken off and so I am not mentioning it here, is the use of a
laser product to enhance hold bars. That is being looked at by the
Alaska region. It was something originally proposed to us as part of the
BAA's. When all was said and done, that evaluation team thought that was
not one of the high value things we should look at. The Alaska region
came back and strongly pushed for that because it might really make a
difference in their environment. The environment in which something like
the laser product may make a difference is an environment of high
moisture. So shadow Alaska, that might be a good aid to enhance painted
markings. It is clear you are not in Florida. We are working with them,
we have actually engaged in a project which we are sponsoring and they
are managing and during the course of this year there will be at least a
limited demonstration up in Anchorage of a laser product. Just as you
mentioned, it's a laser source at one end of the hold bar and a detector
at the other end projecting a series of beams against the environment
and enhance or paint a barrier to the pilots approaching the
intersection.

Question:

It will be dependent on the environment. It will be extremely visible in
some environments. It may not be as visible in other environments. The
concept being proposed right now is that the pilot looks out the window.
We are trying to evaluate the LED strips and enhancing what is already
painted there. In the case of laser, it emulates a wall of yellow as you
approach the bar and it is supposed to be seen with the naked eye.
That's the concept that has been described so far.

If you are interested in more, I think my e-mail address is on the
attendance sheet. I could share with you more on that. The principle
project officer on that effort in Alaska is Roger Motzko. He is the
regional runway safety manager in Alaska. I could put you in contact
with him and he could share with you the findings. Any other questions?
Thank you.

AIRLINES: WHAT WE ARE DOING TO PREVENT RUNWAY INCURSIONS

Capt. Rich Cunningham

If you guys are buying \$11 billion worth of tickets a year, I would
like to mention that American Airlines is a very fine company and we
need your business.

I would like to talk to you today about standard operating procedures as
a runway incursion prevention strategy. I bring the perspective from the
pointy end to the problem so I call my presentation a view from 17 feet.

I first became aware of the concern for runway incursions through our
ASAP program. ASAP stands for Aviation Safety Action Partnership. It is
a partnership between American Airlines, the Allied Pilots Association
and the FAA. It basically works kind of like the NASA ASRS program where
we invite our pilots to report instances they may have been involved in
or caused and we offer them the opportunity to avoid certificate action
or fines by reporting, so it is a really good program. We have had the
ASAP program in place for eight years now and we have received as of
this month 30,000 reports.

As far as runway incursions, that pops up pretty regularly in ASAP. In
the year 2000, we had over 100 runway incursion events reported through
ASAP. In 2001, we had over 150 so American Airlines appears to be
bucking the national trend. I would like to mention a couple of runway
incursion events that we were involved in and that was reported through
ASAP. One was at D/FW. If you really strain your eyes, you can see a
little green airplane in position on Runway 18 Left at D/FW. You will
also be able to see a little red airplane on taxiway Foxtrot 2. The
situation was it was dusk conditions. Our airplane was in position for
takeoff. This other airplane was a cargo airplane, a twin engine single
pilot airplane and it was going from the cargo area on the west side of
the airport to the terminal. He was carried across Runways 18 Left and
Right and was to taxi south on Foxtrot, which is the outer taxiway in
case you can't see it. He mistakenly made a turn onto Foxtrot 2 and
managed to get himself out onto the runway just about the time the
American Airlines F100 was rolling. Because of low visibility, our pilot
did not see him until the very last minute. Our pilot managed to swerve
hard right and rotate below V1 heading to flying speed to get airborne
and avoid a collision. That is one of the events we investigated.

Another one I would like to mention is at Seattle. This one happened
January 2001. The conditions were our MD80 flight was landing on 16
Right. The RVR that night was below 1000 RVR. It was about 2:00 a.m. and
this crew had been up for quite a long time. They setup, briefed and
executed a perfect auto landing category 3 approach on 16 Right. Also in
position on hold on 16 Left was a TWA MD80. Our crew cleared the runway
at taxiway November. You can see where the red airplane is. The tower
controller who was alone operating several positions; takeoffs on 16
Left, landings on 16 Right and also ground control. The controller told
the crew, "Hold short of 16 Left at November" and our crew read back,
"Roger cleared to cross 16 Left at November." They continued to roll
right on across just about the time the TWA MD 80 flew over the top of
them. So all of these things made us think real seriously about runway
incursions.

Common thread in both of these and virtually all runway incursions of
course is human error. One of the things I did to try to address the
problem for American was to join an industry group that has been meeting
for quite a long time. This group is made up of all volunteers and they
are from every aspect of aviation. After about a year's worth of
analysis of ASAP data and other inputs, this group decided, it's a
runway incursion JSIT in case you are wondering, came up with seven
intervention strategies to prevent runway incursions. One was standard
operating procedures and that was the group that I was lucky enough to
get assigned to. Other members of the group were Capt. John Lauer, who
is with us today from American Airlines, and Kim Cardosi was also with
us. They assigned her to provide adult supervision to this group of
three pilots.

What we decided for standard operating procedures is we collected the
best practices from as many airlines as we could. We contacted ten
different airlines and put together a group of best practices and then
we set out to gain consensus amongst all these best practices that we
had. What we tried to do was come up with best practices from the
industry and get also industry agreement to do these once we agreed they
were the best practices. What we were hoping to achieve was standard
operating procedures. A combination of best practices and industry
agreement is very powerful intervention. Also a benefit of standard
operating procedures, as you well know, is that they can be implemented
immediately and cost just practically nothing. So how we did this -- we
spent about a year gaining the list of best practices and we gathered
people in Memphis. We had in attendance this list of folks -- people
from the FAA including Bill Davis from Runway Safety Office, Fed-Ex,
American US Airways, Allied Pilots Association, Airline Pilots
Association, Air Trans, Delta, UPS, Northwest, Department of
Transportation and United Airlines. We all hit the ground with the same
piece of paper -- that list of best practices that we had accumulated
from other carriers, and then we sat around a table for a whole day and
argued over which ones we thought were the best, if we wanted to do them
at all and try to gain consensus which we subsequently did.

This is the document we came up with. What you are looking at is just
the preamble. I won't expect you to read it or look at it, I just wanted
you to see the actual document. What I would like to do is just read
through this list of standard operating procedures that we came up with.

Before I read through them, I would like to comment that the benefit of
standard operating procedure as opposed to just telling pilots to go and
be careful is that telling a pilot to be careful is not going to help so
much because we are already trying to be careful. If you take a standard
operating procedure and weave it into our checklist and our procedures,
we accomplish these the same way every flight, every day. Those steps
can hopefully prevent a runway incursion so that is why we wanted to
make runway incursions part of our standard operating procedures. Let me
just read through these. If you will bear with me. Some of them will be
completely obvious to you and some I will try to add a little
explanation to.

Captains will give a pre-departure briefing on expected taxi route and
restrictions. No-brainer.

Pilots will monitor the frequency when initial taxi clearance is called
for to ensure that both pilots hear the taxi clearance. For those of you
who fly, you probably recognize that when you push off the gate, the
captain is generally on the headset talking to the ground man who is
pushing you out and the first officer is generally talking to ground
control or ramp control. We are asking our pilots to not call for the
taxi clearance until you disconnect from the guy on the ground and both
guys can listen to the taxi clearance.

After taxi clearance is received, the crew will agree on the assigned
runway, any restrictions and the taxi route. If not in agreement, seek
clarification from ATC. Again, pretty much a no-brainer.

Both pilots should have the airport diagram out, available and in use.
What we are trying to do is get first officers to take part in the taxi
problem. Historically, the guy in the left seat is doing the taxi and he
or she would have the map out and be looking at the taxi route. We are
now going to make it a procedure that both pilots are going to take part
in that, have their maps available and out and watching where they are
going.

When approaching an entrance to an active runway, both pilots ensure
compliance with the hold short or crossing clearance before continuing
with non-monitoring tests or heads down activities. The origin of this
SOP that we have written basically came from an American Airlines
procedure. What American was trying to avoid is, when you are holding
short of an active runway, having one of the pilots go off the tower
frequency to talk to the company. I am sure most of the airlines operate
the same way. As soon as you hit the ground, they want to know where you
are and to call to see if the gate is open. That is what normally
happens. You land, taxi clear the runway and first officer goes off to
call the company. What we didn't want our pilots doing was going up to
the hold short line and having one person off the radio. We now made
that a procedure. When the SOP group got together, we decided to expand
that concept including doing checklist, going down and messing with the
FMC or something like that. Any time we are holding short of an active
runway, we have both pilots on the radio or tower frequency.

Prior to crossing or taxiing onto any runway, verbally confirm ATC
clearance with other crew members and visually scan the runway and
approach area. If I am holding short and we get clearance across 18
Left, I will say, "I heard we are cleared to cross 18 Left" and the
other pilot will agree.

Read back to ATC all clearances to takeoff, land, taxi into position,
hold and cross or hold short of a runway and include runway designator
and aircraft call sign. That's just good airmanship. We have decided to
make that a standard operating procedure. If everybody in the industry
abides by that SOP, it will lighten the load for ATC because you won't
have to continue to tell us read-back or hold short clearances.

This particular intervention, or SOP, took up about ¾ of our meeting
when we got together. When entering a runway having been cleared for
takeoff or when taxiing into position hold, make your aircraft more
conspicuous to aircraft on file behind you or to ATC by turning on
lights that highlight the aircraft's silhouette, such as one or more
landing lights, wing inspection lights, logo lights, taxi lights and
runway turnoff lights. The reason this was such a contentious issue was
because there is really two schools of thought when you are in position
on the runway as far as what lights you have on. One school was looking
at the land-over problem. Land-over meaning you are in position and hold
on the end of the runway. Every now or then, nothing against our ATC
folks, but they do forget we are there on occasion and clear another
airplane to land over the top of us, especially at night. So our fix
would be to get on the end of the runway and turn on as many lights as
we could possibly turn on. The other school of thought is that we have
an obligation to the other airplanes holding short of the runway
downfield to let them know when we are cleared for takeoff. We had one
school that wanted to turn on landing lights and we had the other school
that wanted to not turn on landing lights. What we tried to do is come
up with a compromise where we turn on most of our lights and some of the
landing lights. This issue is still being debated, unfortunately. I will
say this, the advisory circular 120-74, which has been out there for a
while and is a pretty good document, addresses this and says turn on one
landing light when cleared in position.

Do not remain in position to hold on the departure runway for an
extended period of time without direct communication with ATC. We
touched on this subject yesterday. It's a good one. We couldn't agree on
what was considered an extended period of time so we just left it at
that. I believe one minute is probably as long as I want to be sitting
there. Case in point, not picking on my own company but, we had an
American Airlines jet sitting on 32 Right in Chicago in January 2001
awaiting takeoff clearance. While one controller was working 32 Right,
32 Left and 27 Left. Our crew began to get a little nervous after 2½
minutes sitting in position on 32 Right. When they heard Alaska XXX
cleared for takeoff, they read back, "Roger, American XXX cleared for
takeoff 32 Right. They rolled just in time for a United 737 to be
cleared for takeoff on 27 Left and flew over the top of our airplane.
That's a pretty important concept to me.

The other half of the lighting situation is to signal intent to aircraft
downfield, turn on remaining lights, those that weren't turned on when
you went into position when cleared for takeoff.

Finally, as part of the approach briefing review, the airport diagram
and anticipated taxi route. Before landing, we are already trained in
our standard operating procedures to do an extensive approach briefing,
even for a visual approach. What we are going to be asking our pilots to
do is now include where you think you may be turning off and what taxi
restrictions you may have. A very good example was the Seattle event. I
just showed you where they landed on 16 Right and 16 Left is right
there. That is what we are trying to avoid.

Because we are talking about anticipating a taxi route, we had to put in
a kind of caution or disclaimer which basically says potential pitfall
of pre-taxi and pre-landing planning is setting expectations and
receiving different instructions from ATC. Flight crews need to ensure
they follow the clearance or instructions that are actually received and
not the ones the flight crew expected to receive.

As I said, we have put together this lengthy list of SOPs that we would
like the industry to adopt. Bill Davis, from the Runway Safety Office,
was in our meeting, heard the discussion and agreed that we had
basically achieved consensus. He has said that he would append these
SOPs to the existing advisory circular 120-74. I said before that 120-74
was quite a good document but it is twelve pages of fine typewritten
writing and we think that pilots respond better to checklists so that is
why we put our SOPs down in twelve short sentences.

Finally, last but not least, I said that we have SOPs we all agreed to.
That wasn't even half the list of good ideas that we got from our survey
so we also added some recommended practices. Recommended practice would
be basically something that is a good idea but didn't necessarily rise
to the level of being required every flight.

Here's a couple of examples. Write down nonstandard and complex taxiing
instructions. Most pilots don't write down taxi instructions. If it's
complex, it might be a good idea to write it down.

Consider turning on taxi light anytime the aircraft is moving on the
ground and off when stopped, even in the daylight.

Capt. Ron Donckers

I would like to introduce Ellis Thorpe who came with me. He is from
Atlanta and handles our ATC liaisons for Delta and he will be working
the Western region for us in the future. I kind of paint the broad
brush, general information and Ellis is the fine tooth comb guy. He has
all the details.

What Delta does -- we have in place a flight operations and flight
safety joint working group. This group divides the safety area into two
focus groups for runway incursions. One we would call a pro-active group
in preventing runway incursions and the other hand would be a
post-incident group. If we do have runway incursions or incidents, then
we would use those strategies with the crews. In the first group, the
pro-active folks, what we are doing is implementing what we call hotspot
posters. The pilot plan on this idea took place at LAX. This was a
combination effort from the users and the airport authority. They have
taken the runway incursion danger areas and intersections and they have
illustrated them. They have distributed this to the various operators at
LAX as far as heightened awareness of where potential problems lie. For
our facilities, we put them in the pilot lounge and any pilot that is
not based but just passing through would have access to the information.
What we are looking into is continuing this concept through other bases
and stations that the company flies to.

The second pro-active approach we are taking are awareness initiatives.
This is internal. We would use our publications, both in flight
operations and flight safety, to get the word out. We have monthly and
bimonthly publications we can use for this. We can also partner with
ALPA and the Airline Pilots Association, Delta's safety group, and
utilize their publications for heightened awareness. We also have
websites, both flight safety and flight operations have websites that
are dedicated to this initiative.

The third effort we would make would be through electronic bulletins.
The beauty of this forum is the feedback. Whenever the pilots are
signing in via the computer, they can go through a safety website and
the safety website is interactive. It asks questions, takes surveys and
the pilots can send feedback. We can use their runway incursion subject
and get some feedback from the pilot, the line pilot group.

I mentioned earlier ALPA partnering. It goes further than just the
publications. The ALPA annual safety meeting was held in Orlando last
month and one of the things that came out of that was the ALPA folks met
with some of the company representatives and pointed out a problem they
were having in Fort Lauderdale. From pinpointing that one problem, the
idea grew that they should meet more frequently and exchange information
from the line group and the ALPA safety folks with the company in the
specific stations we are serving. So that's a project that is going
forward.

The last item we have used over the past year is a line oriented safety
audit. I think it was over 350 segments that we had a completely
non-jeopardy event where we had a representative ride in the jump seat
only to observe the line operations of the pilots involved. For example,
one of the outgrowths of that which we have already implemented was that
no administrative duties will be done until you are clear of all active
runways. As Rich pointed out earlier, after an aircraft lands and clears
the runway, the first office gets on the company radio to find out where
we are going and where we are parking. Well, that is not to be done in
Delta cockpits anymore until all active runways are crossed. That was a
very useful outgrowth of the program.

Let me move on to the post incident side of the house. If all of these
preventive actions have failed and an incident has occurred, one of the
things that may still be in effect, in March 2000, Jane Garvey put in
place the runway incursion information and evaluation program which was
to run for one year and this was basically an amnesty program that they
were just collecting information if there were any incursions.
Reportedly, the program is still active in some FAA regions. That is
useful for both the government side and the user side.

The other thing we do after any incident is crew resource management
debrief. This is the human factors of why it occurred and how we can
prevent it down the road. It follows a full in-house safety
investigation and then we have our human factors team who rolls in and
does a complete debrief. This is where we get a lot of beneficial
feedback from the people who were involved in the incident.

Thirdly, we are anticipating in Rich's group, the joint safety
implementation team, an industry working group cooperating and inputting
some of the ideas that have come from the line and from the company in
this area. As Rich pointed out, one of the highlights which will benefit
all of us will be the SOPs that are being put in place. Once we get in
agreement from all the parties involved I think it will be really
useful. Basically, that's a narrow view of what one company is doing
with runway incursion education and improvement. Thanks.

Brian Ingraham

I fully understand the time crunch we are under for the 1½ hour lunch
so... In conclusion, if there is any questions.

Unlike our brethren at American, I don't have any power point
presentation. Literally, I will give you about five minutes of
Continental's thoughts of how we can improve the runway incursion
problems. I don't have a slide show because what I do is talk. I think
that what we are talking about yesterday and today is humans and how
humans talk to each other and whether or not humans understand the
instructions they have been given and comply with those instructions,
that they fully understand and talk to the other members of their
cockpit, they talk to ATC people, they talk to themselves and make sure
that they heard cross 17 Left as opposed to hold short of 17 Left.

Continental, like most of the other majors, is involved with the major
programs that are going on. The commercial aviation safety teams, the
cash program, the JSITS that Ron has talked about, we are fully aware of
those and we support those efforts. Jane Garvey has implemented safer
skies which includes runway incursions as a major effort. The safer
skies product is supposed to be a reduction of accidents by 80% in the
next five years and hopefully we are working toward that with some of
the efforts that the people in the industry have put out.

We also have implemented and have been the forerunners, to be honest
with you, some of the major programs with regard to auditing. We feel it
is not what you expect, it's what you inspect. The pilot workforce is
one of the largest unsupervised workforces in the world. We train them
and send them out and expect that they will perform their jobs with no
direct supervision. I'm not saying that in a bad way but no direct
supervision to make sure they are performing those functions. We don't
look at them again until they happen to be required to have a line check
or a PC or something along those lines. About five years ago,
Continental put their arms around the line officer for the line oriented
safety audit programs, LOSA, and we have been doing one every year for
the last five years. It's a great tool. What it does is it puts a crew
under a little bit of observation in a non-jeopardy type of a situation.
Basically, it was a program that was really refined by Dr. Bob Helmreich
at the University of Texas and he is the world-renowned expert on risk
management and error management. If an error gets performed, is that
error mitigated? Is that error made worse? So that's what LOSA does. We
take those data and we figure out exactly where the problems are. It
might be procedural problems, it might be perception problems. I could
sit down and talk to any of you for hours, hours and hours about the
results of LOSA. It's a good thing.

On top of LOSA, we also have an ASAP program. Ours has only been in
effect for about ten months now so compared with the 30,000 reports that
American now has, we have about 550 or so, some of which are identified
because of runway incursions. We also run a very robust FOQA program
that tells us exactly what happened. Although FOQA doesn't really give
you much input with regard to runway incursion because it is mostly a
flight regime type of tool. We have a well established internal
evaluation program. We have auditors that will walk out and sit on
flight decks and watch training and make sure that what we say we are
going to do, as far as training, we actually do in the classroom and
bring the awareness of runway incursions to every crewmember that goes
through either initial or recurrent training, specifically pointed
toward cockpit or crew resource management. Even though it is a required
course, some people do it a little differently than others. We include
runway incursions in CRM and throw out some examples for those.

One of the big things that I want to point out is today's commercial
aviation. The airline world is predicated on on-time performance.
On-time performance to get the airplane off the gate, to get the
airplane off the ground, to make the trip, to get the airplane on the
ground and get the airplane into the gate within 14 minutes of your
scheduled arrival time so you can report a real good on-time arrival
performance data at the end of the month. What that tends to do is it
rushes people. It rushes the people on the ground, it rushes the people
loading the airplane, it rushes the people pushing the airplane back, it
rushes the checklist after the airplane is pushed back, it rushes the
crew members intent to cross a runway, it rushes a takeoff. What that
does is it puts us in the situation where the minutia, the things the
checklist are established to prevent, slip through the cracks. I know
that checklist by heart. I know that he told me to cross 17 Right.

Our message to our crewmembers is on-time performance is a very
important issue -- slow down. Do things right. If the first officer
doesn't have his eyes outside the cockpit with you, don't take the
runway. Sit back, we tell the captains. You are under no jeopardy here.
Believe me, the majority of the on-time performance issues are fixed or
are created not in the air. They are created either before airplane
pushes or after the airplane reaches the ground at the other end. Do I
have a gate? No, I don't. Okay, I'm going to sit out here and wait. The
crewmember can take the extra thirty seconds or the extra minute to make
sure he has completed the checklist. We push this to the nth degree.
Slow down, read the checklist, make sure you know exactly what you are
doing.

I agree with the read-back verification. It's even more important now,
and I don't mean to poke any FAA individual in the eye, but the FAA has
come back and said, "ATC doesn't have a responsibility when it comes to
read-back verifications." If I read it back wrong and the ATC controller
doesn't catch it and you cross an active runway, that's all your fault.
We have seen instances at Continental where crewmembers have been
subject to enforcement action because of this very interpretation. I see
people shaking their heads and say, "I don't know what you're talking
about." But I would be glad to sit down or we can go through it at the
end although that will cut down on the 1½ hour lunch.

The point there is we want to make sure that anybody who reads back or
listens to a communication or a clearance, whether it be from the other
crewmember, "Did he say to cross?" "Yes, he said to cross." From ATC,
"Did you say to cross?" "Yes, I said to cross." And make sure you
understand what the exact instruction is before you enter an active
runway. Again, slow down. Listen to what is happening in the cockpit.
The extra thirty seconds will not make that big of a deal in your
on-time performance but it will certainly make a big deal if you happen
to push metal together.

The standard operating procedures that are being developed are great
things. Again, my push is -- the majority of the incidents and accidents
are caused by human error. We can develop all the SOPs that we want,
they have to be followed on both sides of the fence. On the FAA side,
the ATC side, pilot side. One area that I haven't really heard discussed
too much here today, probably because this is a majority of flight
operations type people, are the maintenance folks or the airport
services people who also are involved with runway incursions. We have
developed a very strong maintenance training program for people who are
taxiing or our special move teams that need to put airplanes onto active
taxiways and active runways, to train them in runway incursion
prevention, to train them to listen to do exactly what we train the
cockpit to do when it comes to moving an airplane on the surface.

The bottom line is, we train our people to listen and then we observe
the people during their normal day to day operations on a regular and
fairly frequent basis over and above line checks and PCs to make sure
they are doing what we have trained them to do. Thanks.

Capt. Matt Wise

I really wasn't sure what I was going to talk about. This was kind of
thrown on my lap from my boss about a week and a half ago. He said, "You
need to go to this meeting and listen in on runway incursions." When I
talked to the people about getting a schedule, she said, "Oh, by the
way, you need to do five or ten minutes on what your company is doing."
This kind of bothered me up until probably about 5:00 yesterday. I
thought of some of the things I could talk about. Some of the stuff said
yesterday reminded me of my first trip into Dallas as an Eagle
crewmember. I had started out when we were all separate and I had flown
about five years out of Miami. Miami is pretty much three runways and
the two that we use most of the time are two taxiways away from the
Eagle ramp. So pretty much, talking to ground was, "Taxi to the ramp,
taxi to the runway." Well, do to an unfortunate event in 1995, we had to
move a bunch of aircraft around so I got my first experience coming into
Dallas in January 1995. It just so happened that the first officer I was
with happens to be sitting here as well.

The first thing I noticed coming in here is, take a look at this Dallas
airport map. The first thing that caught my eye was, "They've got so
many taxiways, they've got to double letter them." I'm looking at Echo
Julia, Echo Lima. I was kind of worried a bit. We come in, it's a nice
clear day, come right over downtown Dallas, we're landing on 31 Right.
About the time the nose wheel hits the ground, this is what I hear over
the radio, "Eagle flight 412, turn left on Romeo 2, Romeo Zulu Yankee,
hold short of 35 center, monitor tower, 2655. I looked at my first
officer and he looked at me and I think I had the same look in my eyes
that my eight year old had when at the spelling bee her teacher said to
spell hydrochloromethide.

This is basically what they are asking us to do which is fairly simple
and this is what most Eagle people did. Up until 1995, Simmons Airlines
operated out of Dallas so those guys knew what was going on. This got me
thinking and this is a concept that it may be simple, it may be not, I'm
going to throw this out real quick and then I will get onto what our
airline is doing. We have a lot of people who are flying. United Eagle
is one company. We've got pilots from San Juan, Boston, Los Angeles to
Dallas. I flew out of Boston and they are telling me to taxi to the
vent. I have no idea what that is. Los Angeles was take the north route.
I didn't know what that was. My first time in Chicago, I was sitting
there and there was an American Airplane next to mine and I am listening
to these clearances. I'm like I'm going to have this ready. The ground
calls the American guy and it's like Alpha, Alpha 9, Tango, Hotel,
Juliet, hold short of 9 Left or whatever. I thought I was going to be
lost. Luckily, he came on and said, "Eagle, follow American." I said I
can do that.

A concept that I want to throw out here is since we do have crews
probably 25% of the airlines, and this could flow through to general
aviations as well, that are operating in airports that they are
unfamiliar with. Now we can all ask and say, "We are unfamiliar" or
things like that but if we came up with some concept that said at the
end of whatever your call sign was say the word "New." You would have
Eagle Flight 432 New. The tower controller or the ground controller or
whoever would know maybe you need to slow down on your clearance, give a
little extra time or a little vigilance because this is his first time
here. Usually, after about five or ten times operating in an airport you
become more familiar with what is going on, but up in Boston, that is
our junior base, and we have pilots that we can't even pair together
legally because they don't have enough time in the airplane and they are
up there. Now, when they finally get a pair together, you might have
somebody who really doesn't know how Boston normally runs things. So
they spend more time in the books and in the maps trying to figure stuff
out whereas if they had some way to let air traffic controllers know
then maybe the clearances would be a little slower or they would not
expect them to read them back immediately. The guy could write it down
and take a look. Whoever wants to fly with that can.

As far as what Eagle is doing, at one of my Boston meetings, I go up to
Boston regularly, I go to all the bases and look at stuff. When I was up
in Boston last year, they are participating in an airport safety
project. One of the things they are doing is looking at airport runway
incursions. They have some big PhD that is coming down. They have people
from the different airlines and airport management stuff. I have tried
to attend a couple extra of those, but I haven't been able to, but we do
have our chief pilots in Boston regularly up there and they are looking
at new ways to keep runway incursions as well as other things.

In our simulator training, most of the instructors are doing rejected
takeoffs based on runway incursions. We are required to do rejected
takeoffs and landings during our training process. You can do that by
just having some guy say go around but we also have in our simulators
the ability that when the guy is passing about 100 feet, you can move an
aircraft either at the beginning, the middle or some of the simulators
at the end. We wait to watch to see whether or not the pilot catches it.
We are training pilots from that aspect to keep the vigilance all the
way to the runway just in case something happens.

When I was an instructor over there, there was a handful of us that
rather than having people taxi and giving progressive, we would give
realistic taxi instructions in some of the simulators that have better
graphic capabilities. Taxiing on the ground is kind of hard on nighttime
simulators, but if you have one that is daytime or whatever, you can
actually give complex taxi scenarios so that people get in the habit of
writing them down.

We do rejected takeoffs due to runway incursion. You get a guy rolling
and you pull an aircraft about halfway down to see how they are going to
react. It reminds them to be vigilant throughout the takeoff.

We called it the line standard program up until about a month ago when
we switched to the LOSA because that is what the industry is calling it.
We started ours full time last year and every other month we send nine
people out. We actually observe 300-400 flights every other month.
During that, some of the stuff we have found out -- pilots taxiing in
unfamiliar airports without the ground plate out. I'm looking at that
ground plate before I leave my house if I am going to an airport that I
have never been to. It's amazing to me that pilots will land in
Indianapolis or Charlotte or something like that and just expect to kind
of wing it going in.

Pilots not using full call sign during read-backs. Eagle 342 taxi to
ramp. 342 Roger. Well, if you are in Charlotte, that could be CC Air 342
or somebody else so we are pushing that.

Not reading back full clearances. Taxi to 17 Left Lima Bravo. Roger 17
Left. You need to read-back everything, especially if there are
different ways to get there.

What we do with these reports, they are actually published to the pilots
and they are on the pilots website at the end of each month that we do
this so they are able to go through. There are a lot of other things
they are finding that we are catching. Checklists and stuff like that.
There are 8-9 occurrences each month where the pilot does not have
charts out, not using proper clearances and maybe it will get something
in their head. At the end of each one of these, the pilots are also
going to be debriefed so the person in the jump seat will let them know
what they are doing wrong.

We had the ASAP program. It took us quite a while to get it. Today is
actually our second meeting for ASAP. We sat in five of them over at
American and we saw that they had stuff coming in for runway incursions.
We are hoping we will get the same data and then we will be able to
proceed. The stuff is sent to the ASRS as well as part of the agreement
with protection that you get with some of the stuff in ASAP so their
database will be enhanced as well and the company will be made aware of
the problems. That is pretty much it for me. I want to get to lunch at
11:30 too.

Ken Giles

I can tell you I can sum up our operation in basically one word. That is
partnership. We are lockstep with what the other industry leaders here
are doing. American and Delta are always out in the front on activities.
We are doing the same type of things but we have wrapped it into a
partnership. We are working lockstep with or POI and his assistant. As a
matter of fact, Jim Speight is here now to testify to that. We are
trying our best to work. We have NASA AIMS involved right now.

Let me run through some things. We also have the ASAP program. That is
providing the data for us to show us where our runway incursions are
happening. We have an event review team that is a partnership with the
union, the management and the FAA. We go through each of these and we
try to isolate and pick out the human factors, the geographical point
that is causing the problem. Then we went and tied in a partnership and
we have tied in a number of our pilots all the way through the seniority
list. We have brand new hires to very senior so we have copilots, first
officers and captains and we have NASA AIMS, the human factor
specialist. Jim sits on that committee and they are revamping our
procedures from the time we are pushing that airplane back off the gate
until we park it at the gate. We are looking at how we can make that
safer.

You will see a new procedure come out of Southwest Airlines here
starting next month and that is an airplane moves forward. Both pilots
are outside looking and taxiing. We are building the first officer up.
We are bringing that first officer into this to be jointly responsible
for moving that airplane safely. There will be no activities in that
cockpit whatsoever other than what the controllers tell them to do and
their response. Other than that, they are in partnership together making
sure they have the total vision. Not one down and you're looking on the
side. Everybody is involved.

The NASA AIMS human specialist factor. They have ridden on our
airplanes. The FAA has ridden. This has been a several month study to
set this in place. We are like American, both pilots are on the radio
listening and copying the clearances. NASA AIMS has come up with some
points. The points on the checklist are gotchas. We have revamped that.
That will be gone. We feel we have a real advantage in pulling in very
junior pilots that are new. You gain a lot of information from junior
people. They will be honest with you. They haven't been tainted by your
operation and you get into the flow. I have been here so long I get
where I can't see the trees because I'm standing in the forest. You
bring in a new person, they can see. There is new blood. There is new
vision.

The second partnership is we are going to go to every facility chief --
Los Angeles, St. Louis -- all of them. We are going to ask them to
provide us a controller, a hands on controller, who sets in a safety
capacity. We already have permission from our PO how to do this but it
will take a little special security arrangement. They will be riding in
our jump seats. We want their head set on. We want them to see what we
are facing and we want to hear and see what they are facing. Going in
and out of Los Angeles from Las Vegas, back and forth, and see what we
listen to on the radio frequencies and understand and see if there is a
way that we can do it better. We want this partnership with hands on
people that are moving our airplanes. We feel like they are as
responsible for moving this airplane as we are. If they can walk in our
shoes and we can walk in theirs, we will be better for it. Fortunately,
we have a POI that is very, very helpful in this area. He is on board
with us 100% trying to tackle and solve these problems. Our goal is
zero. That's what we're shooting for with this whole program.

When we look at the future, we are looking at trying to purchase a new
flash screen panel for our airplanes which, in the map function, has the
Jeppesens. We will bring up a Jeppesen page. Let's say Los Angeles. And
the controllers are notorious for swapping runways with you at the last
minute with you due to necessity of course and just at a touch of a
button 24 Right, 24 Left, 25 will pop up for you. When you land and you
hit 50 knots, the page automatically flips to the 10-9, the taxi page.
Down on the bottom is your airplane moving around the airport. It is
there for you automatically all the time and it flips up for you.

What I really want to stress most is a partnership between what we
consider the experts in the NASA AIMS and then a partnership with the
FAA, the controllers, the POI office and the airlines. We are putting a
lot of resources toward this. Thank you very much for the opportunity
and, typical in Southwest fashion, on time to the minute.

Question:

Over at American Eagle, we have a list of things that the pilots are
required to report and we have just added to the list. Go arounds. We
have kind of left that to be any time that you go around, not required
for weather. If you were shooting approach down the middle and you
didn't see it, that is fine. If you went around because traffic didn't
clear or there was a problem, then that gets reported and the safety
department at Eagle is tracking that stuff.

Question: I would like to comment on American Eagle's idea. Some years
ago, while involved with the US Navy, we provide service to the largest
training air wing probably in the nation. We implemented something with
them through a partnership. We got surprised a lot with a lot of their
training aircraft. The one common thread in the surprises involved was
aircrafts with solo pilots who were not yet certified. They weren't
instrument pilots. They hadn't even reached the point of being able to
fly the plane under anything other than VFR conditions. What we did with
them was we worked out a program where they identified themselves as
solo. They would call their call sign, "Boomer 732 solo." That's a heads
up to the controller to really pay attention here. You may not get what
you're expecting. You may want to pursue that idea because it has worked
out well for us. We have managed to really reduce the number of errors
and near mid-air collisions down there have ceased. That was a lot of
the involvement there, so I think your idea is great.

Question: I'm Dave Medina with Southwest Region, Air Traffic Quality
Assurance manager. We have all the air traffic managers here from the
Southwest region and the specialists involved with runway incursions and
overall quality assurance. Last night we had a pilots meeting. One of
the things I said was let's get straight to it. One of the most prime
things we have out there is air time and we have chatter on our side and
chatter on the pilots' side. Whatever we can do to cut that chatter
down, especially when we get weather, we get a lot of requests. We
understand that so it is an urge for all of us here, and we probably
won't have time to get to it but, what would you recommend to us as far
as what we are doing that could improve the quality and what we do, as
you mentioned on the taxi instructions, and feedback from Delta because
Delta tried a program where they said their call sign first and then the
read-back. We hear a voice come back that is repeating instructions but
is it the one we gave it to, we don't know until the very end when they
say the call sign. So those split second decisions are gone because we
are planning ahead. Any feedback on how that went and any comments to
real stuff out here. How are we doing? Where do we need to improve?
Because we don't have this opportunity for all of us to hear what you
have to say?

Answer: As soon as you can tell us, tracon, which runway, the better. I
know that you are doing that pretty regularly, but we have a lengthy
briefing and FMC procedures that we have to comply with. When we know
what runway we are going to, we have to program that runway, brief the
approach, etc. The further out you can give that information to us, the
better. That would be greatly appreciated.

Question: We are consistently running into situations where crewmembers
will tell us that they experienced runway incursions or some other event
that added confusion in the cockpit based on the fact that Boston says
it one way, Dallas says it one way, Miami says it another way. I
understand colloquialisms and I understand the jargon and phraseology,
but standardization to us is a huge key. We run into a major problem
with our pre-departure clearances because the tower will issue a
specific instruction, but it comes out in a different format depending
upon what the airport does.

Paul Erway: Brian brought the issue up of mechanics taxiing and we have
been working with American here recently on mechanics taxiing. Could you
describe whether or not both mechanics right seat/left seat have to be
taxi qualified? Would you be willing to have a little mechanics taxi
summit meeting here in the next couple of months that we can put
together a hotel room where we can get all the folks together and take a
look at best practices for mechanics taxiing. I know Rich Cunningham has
been working this issue with his folks because of the safety action team
meeting with system analysis team that is going on with American. I
would like to look at doing that here in this region for the folks for
whom we hold certificates in the region. If you could briefly tell us
what the requirements are for mechanics taxiing.

Answer: Anybody who is assigned in the cockpit has to be taxi qualified,
so they could sit in either seat during the process. We revamped that
and, not to wave our dirty laundry but, we had a couple of instances up
in Newark where we decided the airplane looked better inside the
terminal than outside the terminal and it was all based on mechanics not
following specific checklist or a supervisor assigning a taxi run
qualified individual to the left seat and then some other person to the
right seat so there wasn't that check and balance. It has cost us a lot
of money because of the fact that we bang up a few airplanes that way. I
am sure many of you have seen the e-mails throughout the Internet
traffic on our MD80 that was sitting inside the terminal up there. In
any event, we have revamped the program to really be specific with the
training and to make sure we don't put anybody in the cockpit that is
not taxi run-up qualified. On the other side of that coin, we also
understand that it is better to have somebody who is dedicated to moving
an airplane move an airplane. We started off specifically up in Newark
and it followed through down to Houston and Cleveland where we had
dedicated move teams. They were either taxiing the airplane or they were
using one of our \$900,000 super tugs that is a tow barless tug and that
is all they do is move airplanes. They move them from gate to gate, they
move them from the hangar to the ramp. They obviously don't move them
out if there is a maintenance run that's required. We have seen a lot of
gains by doing that and taking that role away from somebody who is
basically a mechanic who is now trying to move an airplane. Our position
is that anybody who is in the cockpit now is qualified. We would be
happy to buy into a maintenance runway incursion event as well because
we think it is very important.

Question: This is a comment for Dave Medina. I'm Bob Hall from D/FW. I
am the POI for the Mexican air carriers that fly into the United States.
For the past two years, I have been working with the Mexican carriers to
do something about their English proficiency. In my conversations with
them, they always come back, "Well what about your controllers and use
of standard terminology?" I'm not talking just ICAO terminology. I'm
talking about US standard terminology also. The other thing is the
accents of the controllers. I realize they are Mexican, they have a
Spanish accent, but a lot of our controllers have the same problems with
South Texas drawl and some other accents. It's a national problem. It's
not just Southwest region. They feel there is only one carrier here that
is represented today and I wanted to speak for them and what air traffic
can do for the carriers. Thank you.

Answer: Just for the group here and the customers, we have always called
it phraseology. We are trying to change that term. We don't call it that
anymore. We are trying to change the culture. It's the ATC language. We
have conversations here. We have phrases we use to converse, but when we
are in the cockpit or we are in the towers and the tracon centers, we
have a language we talk. This has come up and we have listened to a lot
of this. As far as the accents, you have Southern region and Chicago
and, as you said, we have an issue. I want to kind of delay this to get
some feedback because this is an opportunity for all of us to hear what
you have to say and we won't get this opportunity for probably a while.
We did hear comments from everybody on communication.

???: I was going to jump in there, but we moved on. Delta is still
attempting to get all the pilots to use the call sign first. As Matt
pointed out, sometimes you can't even get them to use any call signs.
When we get an altitude clearance or a taxi clearance or whatever, we
try to come back with Delta 123 clear to cross 17 Left. That's ongoing
and recurrent in the LOSA process. Line checks. Every opportunity that
we have we try and reinforce that. So that is ongoing.

???: If you're getting single clearances climb 8000 or 16 or whatever, I
could see that working but when you are being turned to final, right to
240 maintain 3000 or stay at 180 knots until such and such contact
tower, that's a lot of numbers. Numbers are not my strong point
remembering. I know my call sign and my flight number because it's over
in my clock over here. It's not a position where I can be writing these
clearances down. It would be nice to be standard, but I could see a
problem as you're getting in closer and more and more stuff is being put
on. In my personal opinion, to say my call sign first, I'm probably
going to wind up screwing up one of the other things.

???: We also emphasize a call sign first and I think it is a human
factor error as far as understanding but then you are asking about how
you can help us. One way you can help us is, after you give us
clearance, wait and let me respond before you give it to Delta and
American. There will be sometimes when we literally do not have time to
even say anything, it's just ... Chicago. They just start in and it is
basically hang on. It is always during a complex time. It's St. Louis
when TWA American pushes. It happens all the time. We understand that is
how the system works. Everybody tries to do it correctly.

???: I would like to add one comment about notams. Can we just have it
from one single source please?

???: That's very simple. Right now it comes from every place. I see I
got agreement from the audience. Paul, can we make that an action item
for next year?

Paul: There is no doubt about it that oftentimes local notams are not
something that you get and that is what you need, right? We all
experience that same dilemma and I think that was brought up back here
as well.