FEDERAL AVIATION ADMINISTRATION

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INTERNATIONAL AVIATION SAFETY FORUM

\"SAFETY FROM TOP TO BOTTOM\"

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BREAKOUT PANEL - SESSION B

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 2, 2006

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Westfields Marriott

17450 Conference Center Drive

Chantilly, Virginia 20151

JAMES A. WILDING Moderator, Retired President and Chief Executive
Officer, Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority

CHARLES BARCLAY President, American Association of Airport Executives

CATHERINE M. LANG Acting Associate Administrator for Airports, Federal
Aviation Administration

GAO LiJIA Deputy General Manager of Beijing Capital International
Airport Company Limited

LANNY RIDER Airport Manager, Teterboro Airport, Port Authority of New
York & New Jersey

AHMED M. AL HADDABI Deputy Director General, General Civil Aviation
Authority, United Arab Emirates

P-R-O-C-E-E-D-U-N-G-S

2:33 p.m.)

MS. GILLIGAN: Good afternoon, everybody. I\'m just here to call you all
to order. I\'m the Deputy Associated Administrator for Aviation Safety.
We\'re so pleased that you all could be here and thank you for joining
us for the Airport Safety Emerging Risk Panel. The panel is actually put
together by the FAA Airports Organization and we appreciate Kate\'s
support and help in this and I just wanted to call you to order and turn
this over to an old friend of the FAA who has agreed to be our moderator
for this session, Jim Wilding. Thank you.

MR. WILDING: Thank you very much, Peggy. Good afternoon, all. This is a
gathering of the true believers back here, those of you that navigated
your way to this room around back here. It is a pleasure to have the
opportunity to moderate this and to do so up here on a panel with some
old friends and some new friends. So the process \-- we\'ve got two
hours allotted to us from 2:30 to 4:30. We have decided to forego any
formal presentations. What we would like to do instead is simply have a
discussion initially between the panelists and then sort of reaching out
and pulling you all into that discussion as well of the emerging risks
in the airport sector of aviation. I will try to start that discussion
in just a moment after I introduce the panelists, by asking each of the
panelists to initially address themselves to the question what one or
maybe two risks as you look down the road are the most troubling to you
when you think of the subject of airport safety.

And then once they do that with whatever elaboration they choose to add,
we can just take off from there and hopefully the panelists will follow
up with each other. I\'ll try to follow up with them and then as we move
along, we\'ll feed a few other topics into the conversation that I think
are relevant to the subject of airport safety. And we\'ll go for awhile,
maybe an hour or so, if it takes that long. And then at that point, I
would like to reach out and pull you all into exactly that same sort of
discussion. So if you would be making notes and thinking as you go
along. If something said up here sufficiently outrages you that can\'t
wait, by all means put up your hand. We\'re a small group, we can make
up our rules as we go along.

Or if you are violently in support of something, so, too, just say
\"Aye, aye,\" and we\'d love to hear from you on it. First let me
introduce the panel and I\'ll move from your left to your right. Sitting
down here on the end is my old friend Kate Lang, who is the Acting
Associate Administrator for Airports of the Federal Aviation
Administration. Kate has been in that spot since December of last year,
having been the Deputy Associate since August of 2003. Kate has been
with the FAA since 1992; most of that time, not quite all of it, but
most of that time in the airports office. Prior to that she did do a
stint as the Chief of Staff to the Deputy Administrator of the FAA and
prior to joining the FAA was an airport person as well, with the
Department of Airports, the City of Chicago, so, Kate, welcome. Great to
see you.

Next to Kate over here, is Chip Barclay, President of the American
Association of Airport Executives, an old hand around Washington,
well-known, well-respected. Been with AAAE since 1983 which I find
absolutely amazing, because it seems like yesterday but has taken an
organization that was always a fine one and made it even finer, made it
a very powerful voice in Washington for aviation matters. Chip has
participated in any number of commissions and committees and he\'s short
of on that short list of people when you need to put a bunch of people
to think something through, Chip\'s name sort of jumps out of the
Rolodex at you. Prior to joining AAAE, Chip put in some time both with
the Civil Aeronautics Board and on Capitol Hill with the Senate Aviation
Subcommittee. So Chip, great to see you.

Skipping over myself, we next have Ms. Gao LiJia, from Beijing.

MS. LiJIA: Yes.

MR. WILDING: She is the Deputy General \-- she said, yeah, because I\'ve
been having trouble pronouncing her name all day. I think that means
I\'ve got it almost right.

MS. LiJIA: You pronounce it very well.

MR. WILDING: Well, thank you, thank you. She is the Deputy General
Manager of the Beijing Capital International Airport Company, Limited,
of course, of Beijing, China. That\'s a position she\'s held since early
2004. She\'s been with the airport company since 1996. She\'s
responsible for developing and managing strategic planning projects for
the company and her background is a strong technical engineering
background which she practiced both in academia in the private sector
over in China and then more recently with the Airport Companies. So
welcome.

MS. LiJIA: Thank you.

MR. WILDING: Moving on down the line there is Lanny Rider, the manager
of Teterboro Airport. Lanny has been with the Port Authority of New York
and New Jersey that owns an operators Teterboro since 1977. He has moved
through a lot of key aviation assignments with the Port Authority,
including time, very senior time, at both Kennedy and LaGuardia
Airports. His time with the Port Authority, a career unto itself,
follows a 20-year stint as an Army aviator. He holds a commercial
pilot\'s license with over 3,000 hours, so he lends about 14 different
perspectives to our discussion today. Lanny, great to see you.

MR. RIDER: Thank you, sir.

MR. WILDING: And last but far from least, down here on the end, is Mr.
Ahmed Al Haddabi, the Deputy Director General of the General Civil
Aviation Authority of the United Arab Emirates. He\'s held that position
since March of 2006, a position which his resume which you have in your
book, points out he got by royal decree which, when you get a job is
probably a pretty good way to get one. He\'s been with the Civil
Aviation Authority since 1998. His background is in aircraft manufacture
and maintenance, both on the airframe and power plant side and his
professional activities have centered around airworthiness, safety and
security which safety, of course is our principal topic today. So Ahmed,
thanks for joining us.

With that said, let me now turn to sort of the kickoff question and just
for the heck of it, why don\'t we start in the same fashion, sort of
from your left to your right and ask each of the panelists to tell us as
they think about whole myriad of issues that can lead to safety
difficulties on airports, which one or two sort of pop to the top of
their mind when they look down the road to the years ahead. Kate?

MS. LANG: Yes, Jim, I\'m going to take the liberty of being able to take
one or two and take two because I think it\'s actually a long important
list that has to be examined, but the first two that come to mind are
issues that have been of great concern to the FAA over the last couple
of years. The first one has to do with what we have to do to reduce the
risk of runway incursions on airports. You know, it\'s interesting a few
years ago MIT did some studies and they were looking at the existing
data associated with runway incursions at airports and they were looking
at projected growth, and between the two of those things, extrapolating
forward. They came up with some really startling and disturbing data as
the potential risk for probability of accidents associated with runway
incursion. So the Agency has put an awful lot of work on that and if you
look at the airport piece of that, a major part of it is really dealing
with the issues of airport geometry. We\'ve got a lot of \-- especially
in the United States, we have a challenge of a lot of older airfields, a
lot of them 40, 50 years old with intersecting runways, intersecting
taxiways, a lot of opportunities or requirements for aircraft and
vehicles to cross over aircraft movement areas.

So it\'s been a real challenge trying to figure out how to mitigate
those surfaces. On the one hand, you know, we have had \-- you know,
made, I think, some real progress but it\'s really required sending
teams to each of these airports to look at the incidents that have
occurred and look at ways in which we can clear up as best we can, the
geometry. And I would just maybe make one other comment on at least this
area. I mean, as much as we can do to clean up the geometry, ultimately,
a lot of what we see are related to human factors and human errors.

I mean, ultimately, we have to do everything we can to improve
situational awareness on the part of everybody on the airfield. Now,
that\'s been very challenging. There\'s no shortcuts on that and
there\'s a real redundancy of requirement on training. You know, for our
office, we look at vehicle and pedestrian deviations, or VPDs. This has
been really hard work. Over the last four years, we\'ve been able to
bring down that rate despite growth in traffic down 36 percent.

If we elect to really focus on these things, we can defy the statistics
and really make more progress in that area, but I think that\'s a
challenge we face worldwide as traffic is going to continue to grow,
what are we going to do to mitigate and manage the risk of incursions on
the airfield.

The other area, you know, taking the liberty of a second one, I\'d
mention is in the broad area of airport standards, again back to airport
layout and geometry. But I do want to talk for just a minute about
runway safety areas. Those are the areas, sort of the surfaces
surrounding the ends of runways and they\'re very useful. If you
over-shoot, under-shoot, or have an excursion off the runway, it\'s an
opportunity to provide a reduction in the risk to aircraft and to life.

You know, I would say that recent accidents both in Toronto, Midway
Airport, really illustrate why having a standard RSA or Runway Safety
Area, is so critically important. You know, once again, though, in many
parts of the world and especially true in the United States, this is
very challenging because we have such old airfields and it\'s very hard
and very expensive in land-locked urban markets to bring these RSAs up
to standard. So there is something that we\'ve had to do and I think
that it\'s an essential part of the safety discussion is, we\'ve had to
think more creatively in some of our research areas and we do have a
success story in that regard.

I mean, we came up with the technology several years ago, Engineering
Arresting Materials Systems or EMAS. It took a long time to figure out
how to make it work but it\'s an arrester bed system. It\'s a crushable
concrete surface and we\'ve at this point, I think all together we\'ve
got like, I don\'t know 21 runway ends we\'ve now done in the country
and it allows you to \-- if you can\'t do a standard RSA of 1,000 feet
or 308 meters, to get to 600 feet with the standard EMAS or 183 meters
with EMAS and get the same safety benefit as if you did the full EMAS or
the full RSA. And the interesting thing, I think, we\'re discovering is
we\'re really reporting saves. Last month alone we had two EMAS saves,
you know, in other areas where we couldn\'t get to a standard RSA. So I
think the challenge is really especially for a lot of older airports, is
meeting international standards really does make big differences in
terms of the safety envelope we\'re improving.

MR. WILDING: Thank you. Chip?

MR. BARCLAY: Well, I\'ll do two as well, a micro and a macro view of
airport safety. If I put an issue in a micro analysis it would be runway
incursions, as Kate has said, because that\'s where we have the greatest
liability for real catastrophic kind of event with the loss of life. So
you\'ve got to be concerned about that. Airports are \-- airports like
Providence have seen a trend toward deviations and been proactive
working with FAA on testing new signage and painting patterns at the
airport and found that there are things we can do that have been very
successful working on those, and I think we\'ve got to keep working. We
can have a longer discussion, of course, about runway incursions but
that would be number one on my list for a specific item.

More generally, though, if you stand back and take a look at what could
concern you these days about safety and the emphasis we\'re putting on
it, the thing that concerns me is the way all the oxygen is being used
up on airport security. If you\'re an airport director today in the US,
all of \-- you know, your top three priority issues are in anywhere in
this area are security, security and security. There\'s a new SD coming
out, you\'ve got to get everybody vetted, you\'ve got to redo your
access control system.

Your money is all going there from your budget. So if you\'re somebody
who would normally have been sitting back thinking, \"Gee, I wonder,
there\'s some new technology I\'ve read about. I\'d like to put it on
the vehicles on the ramp because I think I could track them better and
avoid runway incursions maybe that way\", you A, don\'t have a whole lot
of time to be thinking about that because all your attention is over on
the security side, and B, your budget for doing those kinds of things
has been used up because you\'re redoing your access control system for
security. And in the security, a lot of what we\'re doing in the US is
every time one of us or somebody else can think of a potential
liability, we\'re going and chasing that problem. And whereas, we can
think of real safety issues, those are getting put often in a place
where it\'s not getting the priority you would get if you had a better
balanced view of the playing field, all the ways you could spend your
time and money to better improve the environment at the airport for
overall safety, including security.

So that\'s the one item that I don\'t know to address much further other
than to say it\'s a worry that makes me wring my hands but there\'s a
lot of specifics, obviously.

MS. LiJIA: It\'s my time?

MR. WILDING: All yours.

MS. LiJIA: Good morning \-- no, not morning, good afternoon, ladies and
gentlemen. I think my interpreter\'s English is better than mine, yeah,
so I want to speak Chinese. I think at the end of this time, just one
may can understand Chinese so turn to 10 to your channel, yeah, okay.

I worked in Beijing Airport about nine years, so I worked in airports.
So different city from government, from \-- I say, Chinese, I\'m sorry,
I forgot. (Speaking Chinese)

(Through Interpreter)

According to what I can \-- over 10 percent so you can tell that the
entire traffic amount that we face in China is number 2 in the world.
Our volume level is number 2 in the world, so safety is a very important
issue to us. In the past few years safety to us has had very good
statistic, three accidents out of 1,000 planes. And we hope that in the
next five years we can reach the same level as you are here in the
United States. For other takeoffs we have less than two.

I, myself, are from this airport in China and right now there are two
runways in the airport and last year, we served 41 million customers,
and this year, I think that that number will reach 48 million. That
would be the capacity of our service so that\'s about a 17 percent
increase per year. In such a situation that we find ourselves in, safety
is a very, very important thing. The two experts before myself were just
talking about three issues. First they were talking about the runways
and they were talking about the structure, the geometry of the runways.
And they were talking also about investing in the safety of the airport
operations.

You work at an airport, so what is the greatest expenditure? I think we
have three big challenges at our airport. We have to, first of all,
continue to maintain the growth that we\'re experiencing, so we\'re
under a lot of pressure in how to use the resources that we have, that
was to achieve a very high safety record with the resources that we
have. And everybody knows right now that Beijing right now if facing an
excellent opportunity for us, that is in the year 2008 we will be
putting on the Olympics.

During the Olympics, we think that the volume will go up to 60 million.
Under that \-- for that reason, we\'ll be building the third runway and
the third terminal. So the issue here that we\'ll be facing is how to
effectively and safely operate three terminals and three runways and who
to try to prevent accidents or any other bad things happening in a
situation where there is so much traffic. We want to operate effectively
with the air traffic controllers. We want to also try to reduce risk as
much as possible.

The third challenge that we face is the management challenge. I think
James Wilding just now was talking about a couple of things. Personally,
myself, I am not in charge of safety every day. I\'m not in charge of
the safety, the operations of the airport. Basically, I, myself, am in
charge of future strategic plans. I think he was saying that and also I
do the budgeting and I also do reform management, how to manage our
reform and in talking about how to manage reform and change, change
management, it\'s very important. It\'s something that we talked about
this morning and that is the culture has changed and in the process, in
the midst of change, trying to pay more attention to safety. In the
process of trying to carry out change throughout the whole machinery of
operations, we have to really attach importance to security and know
that everybody is interesting in knowing some details and if you want to
know that, please go ahead and ask me as many questions as you want,
because there are so many topics to talk about in an airport. And
everyday such a huge airport that we have, we might have some incidents,
we might have some accidents in our airport and you might want to know
of the investigation and how we share the information related to that.
We are willing to talk about any of that if you ask those questions.
Thank you very much.

MR. WILDING: Thank you. Your turn, Lanny.

MR. RIDER: Okay, I\'d like to take the group on a little different
journey here. I really want to thank Marion Blakey and the FAA for
inviting me to attend and specifically \-- and Jim, but they
specifically wanted to incorporate an element of general aviation in
today\'s proceedings. And I spent 20 some years of airport management
working at the air carrier airports and I was asked if I\'d be
interested in being manager at Teterboro Airport. First of all, how many
people have ever heard of Teterboro Airport? Probably because we had so
many \--

MALE PARTICIPANT: You\'re famous.

MS. LANG: Probably because we\'ve had so many incidents, but I know when
I got \-- first got to Teterboro about five years ago, a lot of people
didn\'t know where Teterboro was at and what it was. And to tell you the
truth, I thought I knew just about everything there was to know about
airport management and pretty much about the aviation industry. And when
I walked in the door at Teterboro Airport, I found out very quickly that
I had to relearn just about everything I knew.

I\'m not going to say anything new here. I think all of us, and we\'re
all professionals and you all know about the general aviation industry
but sometimes just saying it kind of really paints a picture and things
that if you don\'t work with general aviation every day, might be a
little surprising. So I call general aviation right now the sleeping
giant. And it\'s a sleeping giant that\'s just beginning to wake up.
Let\'s talk a little bit about what is general aviation, what\'s the
definition of general aviation?

General aviation is every flight operation that\'s not a scheduled
service air carrier or a military flight. So for example, let\'s talk
about operations. It could be government, public safety, law
enforcement, charter operators, air taxi operators, sightseeing
operations, corporate operators, fractional ownership fleets,
recreational flight operators, you know, that\'s the type of operations
we\'re talking about.

Everything from the guy who goes out on the weekend and jumps in his
Cessna 172 up to and including people who fly 747s and have every rating
in the book. So talk a little bit about aircraft, were talking about
just that, everything from a 747, BBJ, Airbus Business Jets, every
category of heavy, medium and light jets, turboprops, small piston
aircraft, experimental aircraft, renovated antique aircraft, gliders and
ultra-lights. That\'s quite a spectrum of equipment to deal with at an
airport.

Pilots and crews, again, everything from the hundred hour VFR pilot,
even less than 100 hours, up to the 10,000 hour plus pilot who has an
ATP rating and every other multiple rating there is in the book, all of
these people can all land at the same airports under the same general
categories. Airports, you\'ve got everything from a grass strip on the
family farm up through and including the largest most sophisticated
airports in the world. Kennedy Airport has a general aviation facility.
Newark Airport does. LaGuardia Airport does, my airport is totally
generally general aviation.

So it gives you a little bit of a perspective of the type of industry
we\'re looking at. The issue here is for many, many, many years, general
aviation was, pardon the pun, flying below the radar. It was a niche
kind of industry. As long as it wasn\'t creating a big problem for the
air carrier operations and the air carrier airports, it pretty much was
allowed to just operate and it had regulatory oversight, has always had
regulatory oversight but again, as long as it wasn\'t creating or
drawing a huge amount of attention, it was able to operate and it
operated pretty well, pretty safely when you consider all of these
elements that we\'re talking about.

So what\'s changing. Why all of a sudden has the FAA asked and made
several comments so far in this conference and referred to general
aviation and what\'s happening? And what\'s happening is that since
2001, we\'re seeing the general aviation industry begin to blossom and
expand. And it\'s expanding faster than any other segment of the
aviation industry right now. And it\'s not just in the United States. I
was talking to some representatives of Gulfstream and Bombardier and
Falcon Jet and for the first time, the very first time in history,
they\'re actually selling more general aviation corporate jets overseas
than they\'re selling here in this country. So it\'s booming, it\'s
expanding and it\'s happening very rapidly.

I think what\'s happening here is that the FAA is recognizing, as the
regulatory body, that this is a potential problem. That they have to get
a better handle on what\'s happening out there in the general aviation
industry. They have to review their own regulations to make sure their
regulations are appropriate and are extensive enough. We all know that
the FAA has limited resources to inspect and enforce their own
regulations and the general aviation industry, again, is the one that\'s
been flying under the radar, and unfortunately, we\'ve discovered that
up at Teterboro Airport with some of the incidents that we have
encountered up there.

I think there\'s a huge problem on the airport side. There are 5,000
airports in the US or approximately 5,000 airports in the US and about
500 of those 5,000 airports actually serve about 90 or 95 percent of the
air traffic in this country. Unfortunately or fortunately, as general
aviation begins to expand, it\'s going to start using a lot of that
capacity that\'s sitting out there. In small airports or airports that
basically have low traffic levels, just because of the nature of the
business, corporate aviation especially, they need to move fast, they
need to circumvent delays. They need to look for routes to get them to
where they want to go, be as close to where their customer wants to go
and not incur a lot of ATC problems or airport problems.

So they\'re going to start, I think, expanding out, fanning out into
these smaller airports, less used airports and by the way airports that
have less regulation and airports that have less resources and ability
to upgrade, modernize and get up to today\'s standard.

Now, I say that from personal experience because when I walked in the
door at Teterboro Airport five years ago, and I looked around, having
been used to dealing with professional air carrier airports, I was
totally appalled to tell you the truth, at the conditions of the
airport. They had two intersecting runways with a very limited, barely
adequate taxiway system. Most of the taxiways did not have centerline
lights. Neither one of the two runways had centerline lights. They had
one set of visual aid indicators at one of the runways. The terminal and
ramp facilities were inadequate and substandard.

Luckily, I work for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.
Because I work for New York and New Jersey, they had a huge amount of
resources I could tap into and we began a rebuilding program five years
ago at Teterboro which encompassed a \$100 million capital improvements
program and it\'s taken me five years to get the taxiways straightened
out and to get appropriate NAV aids in there and in many cases we\'ve
actually partnered with the FAA because the FAA was not capable of
expending the money and installing a lot of the NAV aids that needed to
be put in, visual aids, that we did it for them on agreements with the
FAA that we would purchase them, install them and then maintain and
operate them.

So there are ways of doing it, but again, I\'m the lucky one. I\'m the
one that works for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. I\'m
not sure if these other 4,500 airports have that resource. So I think
it\'s something that needs to be looked at. Up until one year ago, if
your airport didn\'t have scheduled airline service in and out of the
airport, you were not required to hold a certificate from the FAA to
operate that airport. The 139 airport certificate, which is your basic
safety standards and safety and operating standards for airports was not
required for any airport that didn\'t have scheduled service.

Now, we\'re a little different, again, working for the Port Authority.
We\'ve had a 139 certificate at Teterboro since the \`70s and we had it
because we requested it from the FAA and then we help maintain and keep
it active and up to date. Last year a new regulation was passed
concerning 139 which created a new category of airports, a Category 4,
which is a minimal standard but at least it\'s a standard and it does
require airports the size of Teterboro who do not have scheduled
service, to now comply with 139. So I think this is a good step in the
right direction, but I\'m not sure it\'s enough given something called a
VLJ.

A VLJ is Very Light Jet which, coming into the industry, there\'s
thousands of them on order right now, basically, looking to cover two
segments of the market as far as I\'m concerned; one, to replace a lot
of the turboprops and two, an air taxi kind of operations where
corporations will be able to throw one or two people in an aircraft and
get them to the West Coast in a pretty quick time.

VLJs are going to be able to operate in and out of small airports with
runways as short as 2600 feet. Those airports right now, I\'ll tell you,
have minimal facilities to be operating the jets. So, that\'s kind of an
overview of where we\'re at with general aviation activity right now and
my concerns about the evolving industry and I\'ve got to tell you, the
corporate aviation piece of the business is expanding tremendously. I\'m
now running 200,000 operations a year. About 75 percent of that are
jets, mostly the medium jets, some jets up to 100,000 pounds. That\'s
about two-thirds the number of aircraft that land and take off at
Kennedy Airport which is five times my size and has two more runways
than I have. We also, on daily activity, many times will exceed Kennedy
Airport\'s amount of traffic. So while Kennedy might run 800 operations
a day, I have been known to run as many as 1100 operations in one day on
an intersection runway operation.

I\'m nowhere near close to LaGuardia by the way, LaGuardia Airport,
which is also an intersecting runway operation, a very old airport, just
puts us to shame. The other running joke and all of us airport operators
or managers at the Port Authority constantly make fun of one another and
so whenever I get the chance to, I give Al Graser, (phonetic) the
General Manager of Kennedy a hard time, about me operating more aircraft
than he does. He comes back and says, \"You know, I have flies at
Kennedy that are bigger than some of the airplanes that fly into your
airport\", and he\'s exactly right. But we\'re a different kind of
operation.

Again, Teterboro, I think is advantageous that we have the resources of
the Port Authority, the experience of the Port Authority. So let me talk
about my two worries about airport safety. And the first one I\'m going
to say and given my experience over the last two years, is awareness and
awareness and awareness, and then there\'s awareness. And it\'s not just
the pilots and crews but it\'s ground crews, it\'s operations people,
it\'s police, it\'s ARF (phonetic) crews, it doesn\'t make any
difference. We have to somehow raise the level of awareness in our
general aviation facilities especially.

It\'s interesting, every accident is different, every incident is
different, different set of circumstances, but a couple of things I have
found and that is people are very routinized. We\'re creatures of habit.
If you make changes, you somehow have to raise the level of awareness of
your operators and your users and highlight the fact that you\'ve made a
change because they tend to do things the same way over and over and
over again.

I\'ll point out just a quick example of that. I just recently put in an
EMAS, an arrester bed at the end of runway \-- it\'s the departure end
of Runway 6, and that was put in as a result of a Challenger action that
we had a year ago. We installed the EMAS and finished it on a Saturday
morning, Friday night into Saturday morning. On Wednesday evening, an
aircraft landed on Runway 6, got his instructions from the tower, \"End
of Runway 6, turn left on the taxiway to LIMA, (phonetic) back to the
ramp. He said, fine. He was from St. Louis. He had been in and out of
the airport a number of times, but he wasn\'t a tenant there.

So he remembered that the taxiway was right at the end of the pavement.
So he taxied down to the end of 6, and when he got to the end, he saw
something out there in front of him that looked like pavement, so even
though there were a big set of lights there and there was a big number
24 up side down that he had crossed, and there was these huge big hash
marks, and there was a sign that say Taxiway Alpha and there was green
lights going down there, he didn\'t think that he was at the end of the
runway so he taxied right into the arrester bed. It had been in place
three days.

Now, he went in about 40 feet. We\'ll probably have to replace about 15
blocks of the arrester bed. That\'s probably going to cost him 800,
1,000 to a million dollars. The arrester bed cost me \$7 million to put
in. So, you know, here was a real stupid error that you wouldn\'t think
would happen. How could a pilot not know where the end of the runway is?

The other thing that was a little scary and leads me into my next items
was I went out and these two young fellows were standing there and one
of them looked about half the age of my son and I realize I\'m really
old and I\'ve been in this business a long time and I probably should
have given it up, but he walked over and introduced himself as the chief
pilot. And that was a little scary to me. I know that the pilots are
young. I\'ve seen airline \-- air carrier pilots that look younger than
my son as well, but the chief pilot walked up and he really was maybe in
this twenties. Not to say he wasn\'t totally qualified and had
experience, but it brings me into my next issue and that is the forecast
for being able to place crews in the cockpits and I think it\'s an air
carrier issue as well as a general aviation issue.

Where are we going to get out qualified people from? Are we paying
enough attention as to how we\'re getting the experience to these people
they need and then we\'re promoting and moving qualified people up in
the ranks that are aware, aware, and aware? A big issue. And one last
issue and I won\'t hold anybody else up for a lot more time here; we
talked about physical constraints at airports. There\'s two major
problems, especially at old airports, antiquated airports, we are
landlocked and we are handcuffed by environmental protection rules. I
have had a nightmare of a time making improvements to Teterboro Airport
that I\'ve had to fight for every inch that I have gained with the
environmental protection agencies. Our laws are onerous to the airports,
public safety takes a back seat and mitigation requirements are so
onerous trying to make up for past transgressions that it almost makes
it impossible sometimes to build another taxiway or to add some ramp
space or do things on an airport to make it a safer, better, more
efficient operation. And I\'m not even going to talk about the public
resistance. That\'s where I\'m at.

MR. WILDING: Environmental, you say.

MR. RIDER: Yes, sir.

MR. WILDING: There\'s a raw nerve or two there. I suspect we might
circle back to that but let\'s finish this first round. Ahmed, all
yours.

MR. AL HADDABI: Thank you, Jim. First of all, I would like to thank the
FAA for the invitation and I\'m really pleased to be here. I believe
Lanny has told a lot of things and I think you covered more than general
aviation. What I\'m going to talk about is our experience in the United
Arab Emirates as I was asked to talk about here. I\'m going to talk
about the rapid growth that we are facing in the United Arab Emirates.

Of course, currently, the UAE like any other Middle East country is
basically witnessing unprecedented growth in it civil aviation sector.
In the United Arab Emirates alone we have international carriers and we
have regional carriers that are operating a number of aircrafts from
general aviation, medium, wide-body aircraft and to the medium wide-body
aircraft such as the A380 which is expected to be delivered within the
next on year. The UAE itself, I\'m not going to advertise here but I\'m
just \-- I would be sharing with you the challenges that we are, of
course, facing that we have \-- that there are almost more than A380
aircraft and almost 100 more aircraft from what is Boeing here or from
the United States and we have almost more than 24 type of aircraft
registered in the United Arab Emirates Civil Aircraft Register.

That is on the aircraft side. On the airport limit and the airport side,
we have \-- you all, I\'m sure have heard of Dubai International Airport
which is now being expanded, redeveloped to cater for at least 50
million passengers per annum as of \-- within the next five years, as of
next year. That is, by itself, or course put a little pressure on the
regulators from all aspects. Another airport in the UAE is being
reconstructed to cater for another 25 million passengers with two
runways. And the biggest project that is now being constructed, the new
Jebel Alley City Airport, which is the biggest airport in the entire
world, a capacity of 120 million passengers.

In 2015 that airport is expected to handle the biggest traffic or cargo
traffic volume in the entire world. That is the changes that the \--
that we are going to face and we have to find the right solution for it.
Again, of course, we have done a lot of things and I am ready to share
with you what we have done based on your questions. However, we do
believe in the United Arab Emirates that the rapid growth will
definitely bring with is safety risks and challenges and that is the
whole issue that we have to find the right way to overcome these
difficulties.

Another thing that we are also facing or the industry is, of course,
facing is working in isolations. The airport develop the airport work in
isolation to \-- for examining the area control centers. They work in
isolation with other government entities. So again, and that was what we
are going to end up with, we are going to end up with congestions. If
you have congestion on the ground, you will definitely have congestion
in the air. That is one of the things that we have to sort out by having
an ATM, an Air Traffic Management, not only for the airport or not only
for the Air Control Center but for the whole industries.

So this is one of the issues that we really have and one of the things
that I would like to share with you is the introduction of the A380
aircraft, the wide-bodied aircraft which we really have to cater for as
of next year. The other issue that the whole industry is facing is
English language proficiency. That is one of the \-- one of the evolving
and emerging risks. I\'m not talking about pilots only but even the
ground operations, the ground handlers, they lack English language
proficiency and that is a big risk. I don\'t know whether you really
have it in the United States, but I\'m sure in our region we are a
multi-cultural society and, therefore, we have people speak Arabic,
speak different languages and therefore, that could be a risk when
dealing with civil aviation.

One of the other, of course, issues that we are actually facing is the
ground handling, it was mentioned this morning. The ground handling are
not being regulated and that is one of the other issues that has to be
addressed. The IATA has not addressed any ground handling and therefore,
some countries they have incorporated into the airport certification
program where they have said, it\'s part of the safety management
system. It is not and that\'s why you have a lot of ground incidents and
even sometimes accidents that would really cause delay. According to
IATA, it varies between 4 billion to \$20 billion US dollar, that is the
cost to the industry because of the ground handling, because of the
English language proficiency also. So I\'m sure there are so many things
that we are facing but I would like to basically limit it as far as I am
concerned to these three issues; the aircraft introduction, the English
language proficiency in the ground handling, but again, one of the most
important issues as I said, industry working in isolation. This is not
in our region but it\'s in the whole industry, whether in the United
States or in another part of the world.

That is a challenge that I believe, by working together, we will reach
to \-- it\'s not a one-way situation. There is no one industry.
Everybody has to address the concern of others. And I don\'t think I\'ll
elaborate further but if you have any questions, I\'ll be more than
happy to take them. Thank you.

MR. WILDING: Thank you. Thank you all. There were a couple of things
that, I think, I\'d like to see us follow up on in this first round and
several of the panelists touched on one aspect or another of human
factors and the fact that for an airport to have a safe environment on
the airplane side, there needs to be a safety awareness, a safety
consciousness and it seems to me that we start from a fairly good place,
because if you go into any airport that I\'m familiar with, and look at
what\'s happening on the street side of the airport, and then walk
through and look at what\'s happening on the airfield side, you see a
much more disciplined, a much more safety consciousness operation on the
airfield side but at the same time, the very things we\'ve talked about,
more traffic, bigger airplanes, linguistic difficulties, all those sorts
of things are constant pressures that are pushing downward on that.

So I\'d like to see if anybody on the panel would like to take on just
talking for a minute about what are the key factors in really building
and maintaining and improving safety awareness on the part of a
workforce in an airport and whose responsibility is it to see that that
happens? Anybody? Lanny?

MR. RIDER: Well, I would say that one of the things that\'s really being
proposed and you\'re starting to hear it a lot is Safety Management
Systems. Safety Management Systems are basically global in nature and
you\'re not talking about a pilot program, you\'re not talking about an
airport program. You\'re talking about a total program of safety,
aviation safety and at Teterboro we have partnered with the industry,
the general aviation industry and with NATA and NBAA and GAMA and IOPA,
all our major fixed base operators or service companies and our user\'s
group which is called the Teterboro Users Group, outfits like NetJets,
and Falcon Jet, we actually pulled them all together in one room and we
started talking about safety and safety management programs and we\'re
partnering with NATA, who is actually creating safety management systems
for all of those elements and then our goal is to actually blend all of
them together so that we\'re all part of the Safety Management System.

Now, whose responsibility is it, it\'s really every manager\'s
responsibility, it\'s every pilot\'s responsibility, it\'s every line
service guy\'s responsibility. It\'s everybody\'s responsibility. But in
order not to diffuse it, you do have to determine who is responsible for
safety and one of the elements of the Safety Management System is to
actually create a Safety Manager for those different elements who then
meet regularly and compare notes and share information and work with
their elements of the system to keep the awareness high. So I think
it\'s a good thing. I think it will help.

MR. WILDING: Gao, did you start to?

MS. LiJIA: Yes.

MR. WILDING: Please.

MS. LiJIA: (Through interpreter) I want to share with you the safety
system that we have established at our airport. Just now we mentioned
the industry has been developing very rapidly and while we\'re
developing rapidly, we have to reduce the rate of accidents or incidents
within the industry. Everybody is trying to look for a very good
solution for it. This morning, somebody mentioned SMS. And in 2004, the
entire Chinese civilization system started to look for a solution to
reduce accidents or incidents. At that time SMS was not a globally
accepted solution. So at that time, our authority had to give certain
safety indicators that for the airports or for the airlines and
everybody which will be used for performance evaluation.

That includes everybody; air traffic control, our suppliers, our service
providers. We established a committee called Safety Management Committee
and every month we sat together and had a meeting and every week, on
Monday morning, we also meet to talk about incidents or accidents. So on
that I think that organization is very important and within the
organization you have to have goals and you have to designate different
responsibilities to achieve those goals. We also have independent
evaluation organization and every month the evaluator submits a report
to the committee.

The most important thing is that the high level attention given to
aviation safety. We actually have medium to high level leaders who have
to attend the meetings of this committee on a monthly basis, even though
I myself, is not in charge of aviation safety but my mere presence here
is really because of the reports given by \-- to this monthly committee
meeting and we all know that you have to know who\'s in charge of
operations, who\'s in charge of safety and we all sit together to
discuss these issues. There is also a Deputy General Manager, who is in
charge of aviation, rather safety who would discuss with me on these
things.

We believe that the practice that we used in the past is actually pretty
valuable and now with the introduction of SMS, we have some changes. One
is we\'re trying to predict incidents rather than try to diagnose things
that have already happened. Another one is called Just Catch or Just
Culture, rather. And we\'re trying to introduce this culture to the
operation of the organization and I think changing culture is very
difficult for us, and my thought is that maybe we can start from the
operation of the administrators and step-by-step trying to introduce
some changes and we\'re still confident about that. I think we have a
three-year plan. We have a roadmap already in place. And I think if we
have a better platform to communicate with airlines and airports in
other parts of the world, it would be a good thing to do and I think \--
I hope that the cost would be limited, too.

MR. WILDING: Thank you.

MS. LANG: Jim, if I could maybe just bookend this discussion because I
really do think that the whole discussion about how do we change or
develop a greater culture of safety, the movement to SMS, all of these
things really are very critical to the future. It\'s really interesting
to me because so often in the airport community the big conversation is,
how are we going to meet this great growth coming? I mean, these are
wonderful problems to have but the real focus is how are you going to
meet future demand, how are you going to pay for it? If you\'re running
an airport, I mean, the questions you get all the time are, are you on
time, under budget, are you meeting schedules, but it really takes a
discipline. I mean, a culture of safety is about every aspect of what we
do no the airport landscape; planning, design, financial, operations,
administration. All of it has to ask the basic questions about in the
performance of this task, what are we really doing to insure that we\'ve
maximized safety?

Now, ICAO has required all member states to adopt SMS and we are moving
that way. In the United States, we are right now preparing to make it a
mandatory requirement for all of our 600 airports. I mean, that is a
challenging thing to do, but I think it\'s really important. I mean,
we\'ve got a wonderful safety record with it comes to the airport piece
of the equation but as we look at the growth and the complexity, we\'re
going to have to continue to develop ever finer tools and to really make
sure everyone involved in the operations are really aware of, you know,
their safety responsibilities.

It\'s everybody\'s job, everyday, day after day. I mean, that\'s got to
be the focus. And I think that\'s why we\'re very excited about the
potential for SMS because it takes the best of what we do and requires
everybody to agree to disciplined protocols and systematic ways of
approaching it. So today we do or don\'t have ramp management practices
on an airport or we do or don\'t have wildlife hazard mitigation
management, or we have ops management. It basically says you\'re going
to develop a system that everybody knows, that\'s a visible
architecture. Everybody knows what the rules are and you have a
predictable, reliable proactive and reactive way of addressing the
safety environment of the airport. I think especially for airports,
it\'s really kind of a new area we\'re getting into but I think it\'s
essentially critical. I think we all are agreeing and I was very excited
to hear about it this morning. I think everybody after a lot of debate
in the international community on the application of SMS to aerodromes,
I think we\'ve all come around and said, you know, this is where we need
to go. Now the trick is figuring out what it is and how do we develop
it. And that will be I think very much the conversation we\'re going to
be having both in the United States and with our colleagues abroad over
the next three to five years as we try to really begin to embrace SMS
and begin to stand up these systems around the world and to do it in an
integrated basis with air traffic management, with aircraft operations.

MR. WILDING: Kate, I have the sense that the safety management system,
you know, I think is very, very promising but that it\'s coming on so
strong that a lot of airports are saying yea, yeah, and then they\'re
walking away and saying, \"What the heck are they talking about\", you
know, \"What\'s it mean? How is that \-- I know what I do today.

MS. LANG: Right.

MR. WILDING: \"Does that sort of slide into SMS or does SMS sit on top
of it or along side of it or what\"? Chip, you started to say something
and I interrupted you.

MR. BARCLAY: Well, let me come back to SMS but first go to your point on
human factors because I do think more human factors research on airport
issues would have a great ROI in terms of safety for the industry. And
you\'ve got an FAA budget that the entire R&D budget is 135 million.
None of that \-- that\'s way too small. None of it\'s going to human
factors on airport and stuff, and you do \-- and it\'s hard to get that
up because of our success.

I mean, one of the \-- one of our big problems is we\'ve been so
successful on aviation in terms of deaths. You know, in this country, we
kill more people on highways \-- we don\'t kill them. More people die on
highways every three months than have been killed since the Wright
Brothers in the history of aviation. So when you tell people, \"Oh,
we\'ve got this great need for limited resources, to put more into
safety at airports\", you don\'t always get a lot of attention to it,
but the truth is that in terms of injuries on a ramp and in the airport
environment, airports are, you know, like number three on the list or
something after fishing in Alaska and timber, or something like that,
and so you have lots of injuries and people in the past, like DuPont,
have proved who years ago had horrible injury rates at their plants, and
went into safety management, have found you \-- they make money for you.
You know, you save so much more money by not having the injuries than
these programs cost you if you invest in them and get them done, that it
winds up being a positive economic as well as a positive safety issue.

And if you\'re not injuring people, you\'ve got a lot better chance that
you\'re not going to go further than that and really be hurting people,
so just a pitch for more human factors research that I think would be
well spent. SMS is a difficult thing to get your arms around. I don\'t
think anybody in our community would say, \"We don\'t want to do better
planning, we don\'t want to do safety management in a way that it does
improve things\".

On the other hand, in our country, you know, we\'ve always pre-empted
local governments that run airports from doing any safety regulation in
aviation. All the aviation laws, one of the first things they say is
Federal Government does all safety regulation in aviation, local
governments don\'t do it. And so you\'re now trying to say whereas in
other countries you have airports that run part of the air traffic
control system. Some of them run \-- actually are the regulators as
well, So you\'ve got a worldwide system that\'s very heterogeneous when
it comes to the way you run airports. So we\'re trying to figure out
together with FAA, okay, how do you take a KO good concept, put it into
our system and have airports do the kind of logical planning across
tenants who you\'ve got some control over? Some of them over others.
You\'ve got a lot of control over your own employees but they\'re a very
small portion of what you\'re dealing with there at the airport. And
it\'s how do we make that fit into our legal authority system to make it
something really effective rather than just a new slogan on something
we\'ve already been trying to do?

MR. AL HADDABI: Jim, if I may add something.

MR. WILDING: Please.

MR. AL HADDABI: See, Safety Management System is basically a culture of
change, so people would have to believe in it. It is not something from
the regulator, \"Here you are, take it,\" and then you have to comply,
of course. We believe, and I certainly believe that we have to do a
little awareness of trainings and there should be a transition program
between the old and the current or the new safety management system. And
I do believe if the top management \-- and here we talk from top to
bottom, and therefore, if they don\'t really believe in it, I think it
will be a documentation of no use because Safety Management System is
not only to aerodrome, not only to air navigation or ATC.

It will also involve aircraft operation. So we do believe it is a
culture of change, not to the industry but to the whole country. It is
something if it is really done with a transition, with actually a
program, with others, I think we will get to the objectives by having a
Safety Management System which is useable, which is easy to take, easy
to have it within the industry and I believe from the regulator's
perspective, if we can really have a transition program, not necessarily
having the SMS as well or the ICAO requirements. For example, most of
the civil aviation now are ISO certified and they have met a lot of
safety records. The SMS is something that will basically promote
additional safety but also reduce manpower, so there\'s a lot of things
into it. It\'s not something that will drastically improve the safety
for actually one day or actually one night.

We do believe without having a transition program, we do have in the UAE
a safety measurement system on the ATC and AO certification but it is
not fully SMS. We have to take into consideration the culture and we
have to ask people to believe in it. It is not something that we have to
enforce it, I believe. We will have enforce it one day or another but
without having a program, I think it is of no use. This is what I wanted
to add, thank you.

MR. WILDING: Thank you. I\'d like to go back and pick up on a point that
Lanny made at the very end of his initial statement having to do with
the environmental things, and just as Chip pointed out, that security
tends to eclipse safety somewhat these days in people\'s prioritization
and where you\'re sort of dragged off in that direction, so too the
environmental processes that we have tend, I think, to in many people\'s
minds, get in the way of other worthy objectives, safety, the one we\'re
talking about here. Kate, is there any mechanism at the federal level or
would there likely be one if people pushed hard enough on it, to get
sort of an environmental shortcut on the environmental laws, more of the
regulations than the laws, if there\'s a bonafide safety project and
maybe even more importantly, my sense and I\'d very much appreciate your
reaction to it, is it in many areas what was years ago FAA advocacy for
certain projects, safety would be a primary one, get sort of pushed back
into the shadows for fear that you get out front environmentally and
favor something before it\'s gone through the environmental hoops? Can
you just sort of walk us around that block a little bit?

MS. LANG: Yeah, you know, from where I sit, we have a lot of competing
public interest but they\'re all good. So I have to tell you truthfully,
I don\'t have a quarrel with our obligations under the law to be
balanced in our approach to aviation, whether it\'s safety, capacity, in
meeting our environmental \-- in balancing those against environmental
impacts. I think we have to do that. I think we have to be responsible
neighbors in that regard. And I\'ll tell you, there\'s very few safety
projects that at the same time, don\'t improve the efficiency of the
airport or potentially improve or increase capacity. And we should
responsibly evaluate those and be clear and honest and truthful about
the potential other benefits that come from those.

Now, that doesn\'t mean we can\'t do it smarter and we\'ve spent in the
United States the better part of the last four or five years really
looking at the environmental process and trying to get rid of our
nightmare approaches. You know, we\'ve had some projects that would take
you know, literally in some cases decades to advance because of, you
know, either clumsy or uncoordinated efforts among both either the
federal parties or local parties or everybody in advancing those
projects. We have done a lot, I think to do a better job in terms of the
environmental management.

I think we\'ve also tried to do a better job in looking at really the
things that have an impact and need to be mitigated and those that
don\'t. And we\'ve expanded the list of projects that you know,
generally speaking, don\'t have an environmental impact. We\'ve tried to
do the shortcuts, but you know, frankly, I think they\'ve got to live
together. If we found something because we lived through some of this
after 9/11 on a security end, if we found something that we, before God
and country could say fundamentally in the interest, you know, of public
exigency, that was something we had to essentially do faster, the
environmental laws in the United States give us the flexibility to do
that. So I\'d like to say, Jim, we do have that but we\'ve got to be
careful not to wrap a capacity project up around the safety flag or to,
you know, use euphemisms for projects that actually, you know, do
increase capacity and so I think you\'ve got to be truthful in that. I
think we\'re making progress. It is hard. I think that\'s okay. I mean,
I think we have an obligation to be good stewards of the environment.

I don\'t know that they have to cancel each other out though, but it is
hard and we have to do it intelligently.

MR. RIDER: I\'d just like to say, and I\'ll be the devil\'s advocate
here for a moment, and I think in the big picture, you\'re exactly right
and I also believe in protecting our environment, preserving it for our
next generations, but I ran into a situation in New Jersey which is not
uncommon and I think different states have different laws and different
attitudes about how they enforce those laws. But when we put the
arrester bed in at the end of 6, as a result of a major accident,
that\'s a 150-foot wide, 260-foot long bed that required a patch of
pavement at the end of the runway to put that in. It so happened at the
end of that runway is classified as wetlands, and in my opinion, it was
a big dirty mud puddle that had very little use to the public given that
it was right off the end of the runway.

But I\'m being facetious. The project was held up for at least six
months in trying to get the permit. The problem was downstream effects
by adding pavement and we had to guarantee as an airport that there
would be no downstream effect, zero effect by adding this small piece of
pavement. So we went through a mechanism of studies and whatnot to show
that there would be minimal downstream effect and they came back and
said, \"No, you misunderstood. We want you to have zero, no downstream
effect\". And we said, \"Okay, well, the only way we can do that is to
give up other pavement\". So we found enough pavement somewhere else on
the airport and we guaranteed that we would rip up that other pavement
and that would offset this small patch of pavement we were creating.

They said, \"Fine, we\'ll agree to that but before we issue you the
permit, we want a deed restriction on the airport that you can never use
that piece of property that you just tore up. And that basically kicked
over to the water department because as a public agency, we can\'t do
deed restrictions and meanwhile the arrester bed was held up. We
couldn\'t actually build the arrester bed.

Now, I don\'t know how many reporters are in here but I would like to
say this is off the record and next week if anybody wants to write to me
it might be to the county jail, but we went ahead and built the arrester
bed and we\'re still waiting on a determination on the permit. So
although I think in the big picture that Kate\'s exactly right, I think
here are specific projects that we need some help, some governmental
help on.

MS. LANG: Well, can I just footnote that because I mean, I do think that
there are individual nightmare stories but I\'m hoping they\'re becoming
rare but, you know, I\'m going to look at a couple of things because to
me the proof is in the pudding or what we ultimately are building in
this country. Since we started the RSA initiative, we\'ve completed 300
runway ends and each one of those had to go through an environmental
processing. We think we\'ll have 92 percent including all environmentals
done by 2010. And you know, the balance, just because of just
complexities in portions of the country, they\'re going to get done. The
same with runways. It\'s hard. These are hard projects to do but we\'ve
commissioned 12 in the last five, six years and a great robust pipeline
ahead of us.

I\'m not quarreling that it\'s difficult but I do want to say that I
think we have to do balanced \-- you know, as airport operators, as
airport administrators, we have to be balanced and not cancelling one
public interest over the other. I think we can live with them, you know,
co-exist with them and as long as we\'re making progress, I think it\'s
hard to make a case for cancelling out some of those obligations.

MR. BARCLAY: Kate, I\'d just argue \-- I mean, you\'re one of the
problem solvers in this so this really isn\'t directed to you but what
the government needs is somebody who can make a decision when you do
have a conflict. Somebody needs to make the balance because what you
have is two co-equal parts of government arguing with each other. I
mean, it was in the old days before we had, you know, schools where we
could go ahead and do all our firefighting testing at airports being
told by FAA, \"If you don\'t do live fire drills, we\'ll fine you\", and
EPA is saying, \"If you do have live fire drills we\'ll fine you\". And
somebody needs to make that call in \--

MS. LANG: Right.

MR. BARCLAY: \-- the government. In Morristown, right down the street
from Lanny, they had a tree growing into the flight path and they told
the airport manager, \"We\'re going to throw you in jail if you cut it
down\", the local EPA did. You know, so there are some of these cases
where you\'ve just got to get somebody \-- we need to figure out a
system of governance so we say, \"Okay, somebody make that balance\".

MR. WILDING: Good. You know, this might be a good time to sort of try to
include you out there in this. There\'s lots of signs of a very heavy
lunch and the hour clicking on. Yes, sir.

MALE PARTICIPANT: (Inaudible) Kate, I have a question for you. This
Safety Management System, do you see that coming under \[FAA regulation
14 CFR\] 139?

MS. LANG: I do, and I want to go back to \-- because my colleague from
UAE, I think, made a very, very important point. That we really do have
to make incremental progress. I mean, SMS really is about a culture
change, and it is going to take time at a lot of levels to have \-- you
know, to really take root. Where we\'re going in the United States is we
will \-- Chip and I were just talking about this, I hope before early in
the new year, we will be issuing an advisory circular for airports that
will lay out what we believe are the basic requirements associated with
an SMS system.

You know, the challenge in the US is, because I\'ve worked for many
years in Chicago. I mean, you can\'t \-- we have 600 airports that are
certificated and they to from the 70 or 80 that constituted 90 percent
of the operations in this country to airports, you know, with 10,000 or
less in plane passengers. So we\'re going to have to figure out SMS
systems that are appropriately scaled to the operation of the airport.
So that guidance will be out by the end of the year.

Likewise, we\'re right now developing for all inspectors what they\'re
going to need in order to work with airports and coming into compliance
and moving toward SMS. We have already initiated a rulemaking process
that will propose making, as an amendment to our 139 which is the ANEX
14 requirements, we will be making it. We\'re proposing to make it a
mandatory part of an airport\'s 139 requirements and a feature of the
ACM or the airport manual, operations manual. So we\'re moving there but
I mean, it\'s \-- I would like to think about it this way; it\'s the
beginning of what will be a very long conversation.

Jim and I both serve on a board called the Airport Cooperative Research
Program, ACRP, is that it?

MR. WILDING: Right.

MS. LANG: And this summer when we met, SMS was a very animated
conversation we had. The ACRP has also commissioned some studies to be
done that will make available both to airport operators and to the FAA
increasing literature about how we do this right. I mean, all over the
world, we\'re looking at member states of ICAO trying to stand it up,
but I think the trick is we\'re going to try to all figure out how
we\'re going grow this system together. But you can expect within the
next three to five years, we will have it as a formal mandatory
requirement under 139.

MALE PARTICIPANT: And then a couple of questions; what about ramp
safety? Do you see that coming under 139 as well?

MS. LANG: You know, I do. I think ramp safety ought to be something that
an airport works on anyway and I agree. I\'ve looked at a lot of the
reports done by the Flight Safety Foundation and it is really staggering
to see the amount of aircraft damage that results because of just
reckless activities on the ramp, and it\'s \-- they have a nice way of
putting it, it\'s very democratic. I mean, everybody who has access to
the ramp is doing something that is totally avoidable to do damage to
aircraft and in some cases, they have catastrophic results.

I mean, safety management on the ramp is a perfect example of something
that if organized in a disciplined manner all the parties on the
airfield really lends itself to SMS. So I would expect that ramp
management is going to be an increasingly important topic both in the US
and in the international community and just in light of the cost to
aviation annually. So we\'re going to have to figure that one out, how
to it better as well.

MALE PARTICIPANT: And one more question; it\'s for the representative
from Beijing. You said that you meet on a monthly basis and then on a
weekly basis and you review accidents and incidents. What kind of after
action do you do and how is it formed and also how do you control
vehicles? What type of system do you have for controlling vehicles and
vehicular activity, that type of thing.

MS. LiJIA: Thank you for your question. The ramp management, generally
speaking on that, we have four types of issues. One is the safety of
runways and taxiways, prevention of birds getting in their or wild
animals from incursions. And the third issue is how to control vehicles
and to make sure that they would run their efficiently, effectively,
preventing them from running into aircraft and the other is how to
effectively manage these issues.

I think you were probably asking us technically how do we control the
vehicles on the runways or ramp. We have two ways. One is through
certification. We certify all the vehicles annually who are allowed
access to the airport. The drivers and the vehicles themselves have to
be managed effectively. There are certain speed limits which is 25
kilometers and technically we have two ways of managing that. We have
signs and lines in the area next to runways and we also use more
advanced radar technology to detect speeding of vehicles.

You also care about our routine meetings. Our routine meetings will
categorize our safety-related issues into four areas. One is runway
safety issues. A second category because our \-- we\'re not only
responsible for safety but also security, so we have responsibilities in
that area, too. And the third is information system which is also very
important, the safety of information system and information equipment.

And the fourth area of concern is fire control. So whenever there is an
incident, we will have a decode recording under these four main
categories, and there also are a lot of subcategories under each of the
four and you will record the reasons of any incident so that all the
airport operators are aware of their own performance. Therefore,
everybody else can take a lesson from that, from what has happened. So
we have been doing that for about seven or eight years. So we believe
that this approach is a very important way of establishing a culture of
safety awareness. We also have a lot of details if you\'re interested,
we can talk about it, too.

MR. AL HADDABI: Just one comment on \-- around safety. Some airlines or
some of the regulators, they leave it up to the airline to basically
insure that the ground handling are part of their system. Some
regulators, they leave it up to the \-- as part of the aerodrome
certification, part of the safety measurement system. But I think it is
now time to regulate them and they are right now.

But the problem that people are not aware of that is what kind of
regulation you are going to apply, what kind of qualification that this
one might have? Are we going to treat them like pilots, like ATC, like
land dispatchers, like engineers? These guys are paid less than anybody,
so what kind of system that you are going to apply? This is an issue
that these people are normally less qualified, those who actually drive
on the ramps, the ground handler. They are really paid less than anybody
else. That is an issue of concern.

We can have the best of regulations, but it if these guys are not
educated, then you will have an accident, regardless of the best safety
measurement that you really have. That is an issue as far as I can see.
This is what I wanted to add. Thank you, sir.

MR. WILDING: Yes, sir.

MR. PAEZ: Yes, my name is Luis Paez. I come from the Columbian Civil
Aviation Authority. I would like to address this question to Mr. Rider,
in order to be sure I understand correctly. Did you consider that the
safety culture is right now inside the US airports and also is there any
FAA policy regarding implement a program of safety culture that enforce
airports to adopt or is it an individual airports. It depends, as you
mentioned it, for the manager to do that job or you transfer this job to
the air carriers or operators of the airport? Thank you.

MR. RIDER: Okay, you asked a lot of questions. I\'m not sure I can
remember all of them. Let me try it. As far as safety regulations in the
United States and the regulations that cover the general aviation
industry, do I \-- I think you\'re asking do I think they\'re adequate.
Okay. I think that we have regulations that cover all aspects of safety
in the industry right now. That\'s not the problem. Having the
regulations is not the problem. I think enforcing the regulations and
implementing the regulations and getting buy-in from all segments of the
industry is or can be a problem in the general aviation sector.

When I talk about awareness and the \-- and my concern about the level
of awareness, that\'s part of what I\'m talking about. It can be spacial
awareness of where you\'re at in your aircraft on an airport. It can be
an awareness of what the regulations are it can be awareness of future
safety issues but what I\'m concerned about is not the regulations. I
think the regulations are fine. I think this country has addressed all
of the safety issues and they probably have a regulation that would
address each and every thing, but we still do have accidents and we
still have problems. And in an emerging or rapidly expanding portion of
the industry, my concern is how do we raise the level of awareness
within the industry to know what those regulations are, know how they
impact your operation specifically and to be on the edge all the time.
You know, it\'s easy to become complacent.

And I think things like Safety Management System where we\'re trying to
work together to keep that awareness up there at that very high level is
a good thing, and it\'s something that is needed in my segment of the
aviation industry. Is it the airport manager\'s responsibility? Well,
again, we kind of fall back, I think we talked about this a little bit
before, I think we\'re a good place to draw the different various groups
together at a specific facility and raise the level of awareness such as
at Teterboro, but it has to be done across the industry. You can\'t rely
on just the airport manager.

It has to be your operations directors, the company owners, the aircraft
operators, the FBOs and the ramp service people. A big service company,
Signature Flight Support is a huge \-- probably the largest FBO
operation in the world. They have operations all over this country and
all over international countries as well. If they develop a good SMS
program for ramp safety then that, obviously, should go throughout their
system, but it should show up at Teterboro somewhere along the line, and
them working with me as the airport manager, can spread that word to
other FBOs and ramp operations and get us all kind of up to that level.
So that\'s kind of where I\'m hoping this is going to go.

What was your other questions? Did I miss anything? Go ahead I can hear
you.

MR. PAEZ: No, you didn\'t miss anything because you are mentioning is
that across the industry. They put me in that scenario of the FAA that
is responsible to do that across the industry. So in this case, what is
concern to me is that how could we, as international community, assure
that SMS would be implemented in airports in the whole world and spread
into the system in a proper way? If it is an ICAO standard, this morning
we were talking about that there are a lot of countries that don\'t
fulfill the ICAO standards. So we are going to develop SMS for airport,
for airlines, for operators, for authorities, ATC providers, that they
don\'t mesh together. How we can be sure and that\'s the question for
the panel, that we are not going to generate more inconsistence and err
against the harmonization that this morning we were talking about? Thank
you, that\'s the other question.

MR. RIDER: Yeah, and I couldn\'t agree with you more and I\'ll let Kate
talk a little bit about this as well, but as they were mentioning it
this morning and they actually have identified problem areas around the
world, in Africa, in Russia, and in South America, that is not different
than what\'s happening with general aviation in this country where you
have different levels of sophistication, different levels of training
and different levels of resources to be able to comply with this myriad
of regulations and requirements.

I think ICAO is a huge step forward in bringing the world together but
there\'s two elements here. There\'s one that is education and educating
the people about what is required and then getting them to evaluate
their own operations and come up to at least a minimum standard. That\'s
one side of the house.

The other side of the house is enforcement. And I think you do have to
have an enforcement arm and we\'ve seen this with some incidents at
Teterboro recently where the enforcement part wasn\'t there, where there
were gross negligent violations of existing regulations. I think there
has to be an enforcement arm there and you need the education but you
also have to see if people are complying or not. Kate, maybe you have
some ideas.

MS. LANG: You know, I think it\'s a great question and it\'s one, that
again, I think requires that we move thoughtfully forward. You know,
I\'ve spent a lot of time talking to my colleagues, Nick Sabatini and
Peggy Gilligan in our safety organization that have stood up SMS and are
already moving there and one of the most important things just within
the agency is going to be the challenge of having our systems grow
together kind of seamlessly. So we\'re going to actively have to work
that, but I mean, that\'s really the whole point of SMS is that we find
integrated ways to do things together. It\'s not just about stovepipe
communication; you know, air traffic does its thing, flight standards
does its thing, aircraft certification does its thing. It is about
safety being everybody\'s thing which means figuring out ways again,
back to the protocols and the process and the understandings of how
we\'re going to communicate all of that together.

I mean, right now, you know, I agree with Jim. You know, you said SMS
and everybody is like, all right. I go to conferences and say to people,
you know, how many people know what SMS is? You know, we\'re talking to
US airports about moving to SMS, and I might get two hands out of 300.
So we\'ve got a really long ways to go and I think the most important
thing that we\'re learning as we go is that we\'ve got to do it in open
dialogue. I mean, that\'s the challenge we have within the FAA. That\'s
why I think forums like this are so important. I mean, we\'re just going
to have to keep having a conversation with each other about you know,
not only SMS, it\'s about sharing data. It\'s about collecting data.
It\'s about making sure we all have, you know, visible systems and
structures that we can share with each other.

I mean, that\'s really the challenge of SMS and I think, again, it\'s
about taking those incremental steps and a commitment. Whether you\'re
just looking at the airport. I love your description of what you do in
Beijing. It isn\'t just the ops office, it\'s everybody all the time
sitting down and figuring out how you do it. I mean, it\'s first and
foremost that commitment to get everyone together.

So I think we\'re just \-- we\'re really kind of at the beginning of
making sure exactly what you describe is where we are emerging to.

MR. WILDING: My sense is sort of borrowing a page from the security
area. I think one of the great successes in security in the United
States at airports is having made the sale to the workforce at an
airport sort of from the managerial level right down to the unskilled
labor level that their eyes and ears were the biggest asset in the
system. And that no matter what your job was, security was now also a
part of it and if you saw something out of the ordinary, tell somebody.
And even if you were wrong and were embarrassed, the organization would
protect you.

Again, I think that\'s one of the successes they had. I think that same
attitude needs to be more uniformly present in the safety area. That if
you, you know, on a cold blustery day, where you\'re anxious to get
inside and you\'re driving a baggage tug, that it\'s just wrong to cut
that corner. It\'s just wrong. It\'s wrong hopefully because you did
something really bad but even if you don\'t buy into that, it\'s wrong
because if your employer sees you, if the airport sees you, if one of
the local police officers see you, that the odds are against you because
there\'s a lot of people that think of this as their job and you\'re
liable not to get away with it. That \-- I hope it doesn\'t get to that
in a person\'s thinking but if it has to and some people just, that\'s
the way they live their lives.

They\'ll drive 100 miles an hour up this road here if they think the
police aren\'t watching. That attitude sometimes creeps onto your
airport, so you have to deal with that reality. So again, that same sort
of general it is my job attitude, for everybody that\'s out on that
airfield in the safety area just as it is in the security area, that, it
seems to me is a goal, and I think it is achievable but it\'s an awfully
hard sell, an awfully hard sell. Bob, you had a \-- oh, I beg your
pardon. I\'ll go over there and then to Bob.

MR. COHEN: Mickey Cohen from AAR. I would like to spend a little bit of
time talking about the human factor side that we briefly went over. I
just retired after 35 years in the airline business on the other side of
the fence and I\'ve been through the pilot\'s side, I\'ve been through
the maintenance side, the operations in total and we evolved CRM into
MRM, which is all human factors. And one of the things that we have to
admit to ourselves is we, as leaders, we have good ideas, but the really
good ideas are the people that are doing the job out there. And we have
to extract it from them. So you have to have a just culture out there
where people have no fear of reprisal by coming forward. They have to be
awarded, if you will, not necessarily monetarily but certainly be
recognized for their contributions and get those people to come forward
and give us their ideas, not after the fact all the time but some of the
time proactive and if we take that and we move forward with it, it is a
great stepping stone to this SMS.

SMS is s giant step and we can\'t get there in one leap. So we need to
have a couple of steps to get there. And I have seen great successes on
the ramp, all the ramp damage we talk about. Terrific successes with it.
In the maintenance organization, it\'s quite obvious and in the cockpit
as well. So those of you that don\'t have programs, it\'s very easy.
Boeing puts out a great training program. You can have a one-day
training program and you can implement it and when you go out and you
sell it to your employees, and once they have trust in you that you\'re
not going to come and whack them on the head for something they tell
you, you\'d just be amazed at how much information you get and the
corrective actions you can take going forward. So I really encourage any
of you that have not explored that, to do it.

MR. WILDING: I would add the observation that it\'s my experience that
when you whack them on the head, you might forget it the next week, but
10 years later, they still remember it. So I mean, it\'s amazing how
long people can remember things like that and react to it.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: The most important thing is they know they\'re going to
get whacked and they\'re not going to tell you. They\'re going to hide
it. And what you want to do is to get the information out because this
person may have the skills to handle a situation, the next person may
not, so you want to get the corrective action in there so it doesn\'t
happen to the next person.

MR. WILDING: Bob.

MALE PARTICIPANT: That\'s Dan Marino of ICAO, wonderful, wonderful human
factors person at one point said, and I\'m sure he said it a number of
times, \"Blame is the greatest enemy of safety\". Interesting statement.
Kate, could we ask you to talk a little bit more about EMAS? It seems to
me it\'s something that\'s spreading now. It spreads a little faster
after there\'s a Midway or a Burbank or a Teterboro. And could you talk
a little bit about where you see it going in this country because there
are a lot of people in this room, I think that will be interested,
international people, who will be interested in EMAS.. It\'s obviously
not something unique to us.

MS. LANG: Well, maybe just a couple of other comments on EMAS. I mean,
it really is from the FAA\'s perspective, one of those real success
stories in taking something that was a research idea and finding a way
to successfully deploy it in the field and you know, frankly, Bob, the
more experience we get with it, the less costly it\'s becoming, the
cheaper it\'s becoming to maintain. That\'s been a real impediment to
getting the airports to embrace it.

I think the good news is we are seeing more deployment in the United
States. I mean, if you can get a standard RSA and it\'s, you know,
affordable, that\'s a great thing to do, but if you can\'t EMAS is a
really viable alternative. And as you go around the world, a lot of
people are facing those challenges.

MALE PARTICIPANT: Excuse me, is that funded by you?

MS. LANG: It is funded by the FAA. I mean, at eligible places in the
United States, we are doing EMAS installations under the grant program.
I mean, we\'re also very vigorously funding RSAs. We\'re putting our
money where our mouth is. We\'re doing about \$300 million a year to
assist local airports in getting that done. I am very encouraged.

We have ongoing research. I mean, there\'s real challenges to EMAS in
terms of, you know, what we can do to improve the performance of it, so
we\'ve got research in very cold conditions. We\'re really doing what we
can to improve the quality of the arrester bed material. I\'m delighted.
Within the past year we\'re really beginning also to see worldwide
acceptance. I think we\'ve got China is interested right now, Madrid,
Italy. So we\'ve got three countries right now that are looking into it,
and the more we talk about it, the more acceptance, I think, it\'s going
to gain worldwide.

I think the more we keep researching to, we\'re going to increasingly
make it more cost affordable for various airports to find it a viable
solution for improving, you know, runway safety.

MR. BARCLAY: Let me add, I don\'t disagree with Kate, but you can\'t
minimize the fact that once you get down away from the port authorities,
there\'s a great deal of concern of the small and medium sized airports
on the maintenance issue, and well, and as Kate said, it doesn\'t work
currently in cold weather. You\'re not going to solve your Alaskan
problems with EMAS, at least currently. But the maintenance of it and
the issues as the example at Teterboro showed, when you have someone
make a mistake, repairing that, keeping it up on an annual basis it\'s a
ways off from being a good economic solution at the smaller airports.

MR. WILDING: Also, I should add that the very research program that Kate
mentioned a minute ago, the new cooperative research program, the
airport cooperative research program up at TRB, has a project underway
now, 400,000-ish dollars, to look for other things like EMAS that can
serve that same purpose and to look at EMAS and EMAS like arrester beds
which are today designed purposely not to damage the airplane. That\'s
kind of a constraint that\'s put in there, and you have some situations
where, you know, damaging the airplane is a heck of a lot better than
letter the airplane scoot off the end of the EMAS or something that\'s
not protected by an EMAS. So it\'s starting to put some gradations in
this thing where if it gets all the way down the end and it\'s still
going, you sort of say, \"Well, the heck with the landing gear, you
know, I want that thing to stop before it hits that road out there\". So
there\'s some fairly active research going on in that area right now
that I think is hopeful.

MS. LANG: Hey, Jim, could I put a plug in. We\'ve mentioned the Airport
Cooperative Research Program but it\'s new for us. We\'re only really
\-- I guess we\'ve only had two meetings so far but anyone in the world
can propose a topic that can be considered by our board. Anyone in the
world can propose a topic if it is related to what can help you do any
portion of your job in running an airport. You can apply to this
program. You can go \-- we can either get you the information but we
have a website for the program. It\'s a resource to the entire
international community and all the research that comes out of the
products that we do commission are available for free to anyone in the
world. So it\'s a new resource. We\'ve very excited about it and I think
the topics that we\'re starting to undertake are extremely timely in
terms of what we\'re trying to do to improve both airport efficiency and
safety.

MR. RIDER: Maybe I\'ll just put a plug in, too, especially to the FAA
because I\'m very glib about saying that the Port Authority or me or we
installed an EMAS. The FAA paid for that EMAS, 95 percent of it and
there was no problem getting the funds. They made it extremely easy and
worked with us on all of the issues. It\'s a wonderful program as far as
I\'m concerned. I was at Kennedy when the very first one was installed
in the country. We had it in less than a year when a 17-passenger
aircraft ran into that EMAS and minimal damage to the aircraft,
absolutely no injuries to the people and I\'m personally convinced that
aircraft would have wound up in a body of water up side down had not the
EMAS been there and we probably would have lost all of those people. So
I\'m personally a big, big believer.

I will say that EMAS is designed for runway overruns. If the aircraft is
airborne or almost airborne, it probably won\'t have an effect on the
aircraft. Obviously, if it\'s airborne, it won\'t.

MR. WILDING: Other questions, comments?

CAPT; ROBERTS: Thank you for the panel. Captain Bill Roberts from
American Airlines. I\'m the Managing Director of Flight Operations and I
would like of like to direct my question towards Ms. Lang regarding
runway status lights. Originally, we talked a lot about some concerns
about runway incursions and certainly that is something that is a big
concern for us, especially large operators out of DFW, Chicago, and
things of that sort. And at DFW on the west side of the runway right now
we do have runway status lights that are in place, and I believe, if
I\'m not correct, if I\'m correct, there\'s also one in San Diego
that\'s being tested as well. I\'m curious as to what the long-term
progress is of that because I will tell you I\'ve had an opportunity to
demonstrate it a couple of times to some local media folks in Dallas and
also for the Discovery Channel and I am a huge proponent of that system.
It works extremely well and I think it\'s something that I hope to be
able to hear some positive news from. So if you could maybe address
that, I would appreciate that, thank you.

MS. LANG: Well, you know, I\'m delighted by your comments. I mean there
are a lot of things that we have research programs going on and when we
get enough confidence, we start to do field deployments. So it\'s very
gratifying to hear from someone in the user community saying, \"Boy,
this is terrific and it\'s working well\". I think the more \-- you
know, the FAA is a conservative institution and I think you know,
changing the environment of the airport is something we should to with,
you know, a preponderance of evidence that it\'s going to work.

So I think the fact that we\'ve got some of these in-field deployment
right now, is how we\'re building up a body of evidence to say under
what conditions and at what kind of airports do changes, whether it\'s
markings or lighting or signage, what are the things that actually do
something to add to clarity and not confusion on what\'s going on in the
airfield. I mean, a lot of airports you can go out there and there\'s
all kinds of lights doing all kinds of things. So we really do want to
make sure that when we\'re going out into already a complex environment,
we\'re doing things that, you know, increase clarity. So I would say
that as long as the data keeps coming in saying that it moves in that
direction, you\'ll see us again, not only doing \-- advancing field
deployment but we\'re also happy to pay for those systems to assist
airports in moving forward with things that do advance it.

I would urge you because I have had a chance to talk to a lot of pilots,
if you are getting positive feedback from that, let us know, let our
Tech Center know because that is exactly the kind of \-- it\'s the
reason why we\'re doing these tests out in the field. And DFW, I have to
tell you, Dallas is a wonderful place. We\'ve got a number of research
initiatives we\'re doing up there. Right now we\'ve got a radar system
for bird strikes. So I\'m very grateful to our partners in the airport
community for everything they do to help us test these systems.

So I think the outlook is good. You\'re going to continue to see a lot
of activity in this area on the part of the agency. And if you think
we\'re missing a beat, you always got the ACRP to toss in an idea and
suggest we do something we\'re missing.

MR. WILDING: Kate mentioned the FAA\'s own research program up at the
Tech Center at Atlantic City, New Jersey, which is separate and distinct
from the ACRP program we talked about earlier. And they\'re doing what
Kate just referred to, use of radar to strike \-- to sort of be able to
spot bird migration which is promising. They\'ve got a radar system up
there for FOD which is absolutely amazing. I mean that thing can spot a
bolt laying on a runway three-quarters of a mile away when the bolt is
sort of turned away from you and just showing the head. And you know,
there are some wrinkles to iron out but there is a bunch of people up
there that are the most curious, the brightest and I mean, they\'re just
amazing. But the point Kate just made, I had the pleasure to serve on a
little advisory committee for them, is how difficult it is for them to
connect to the users of the system. I mean, they\'re up there just
ginning up these ideas and reacting to it but as you can imagine, when
you\'ve got research in your name, and you call somebody and you want
them to do something, you know, \"Come back next week, I\'m kind of busy
this week.\"

The more the user community can put aside a little time and energy to
work with these people, the payoff, I think will just be enormous. Last
call, anybody else? Yes, sir.

MALE PARTICIPANT: I would like to address this question to Ms. LiJia,
Gao. I\'m going to do it in Spanish in order that the interpretation
could help me. (Through interpreter) The question is the following. You
are in charge of the planning process at the airport and understanding
that that process includes the mitigation of risks and removing the risk
of incursions, are there other risks that result in the severe damages
to the airlines from the economic point of view, such as bird strike,
weather, bad information, FOD and other incidents that take place on the
runways and on the taxiways? Within the overall risks that Beijing
Airport handles, what are the most significant risks in your opinion?
Thank you.

MS. LiJIA: (Through interpreter) Your question seems to be long and I
know you spoke in Spanish, so I don\'t know, going into English and then
back into Chinese, if I got you \-- if I got what you\'re saying and
I\'ll try to continue along the lines of what I heard because English
translated Chinese is difficult.

But basically speaking, overall, we\'re all just talking about birds,
bird ingestion and how we could use new technology to try to prevent
bird ingestion. So we have a lot of information in this area because in
different months of the year there are different bird activities that
are going on. We used to use three different types of methods. We used
to shoot them with a gun, we used to also use a gas gun, a regular gun
and then the third thing that we used to do was we used to use
ultrasound to try to get them.

They idea is in general to have 76 sorties and so in other words, we\'re
hoping that in getting at these birds and the bird ingestion, we can
reduce the problems that occur as a result of them. What we\'d like to
do is out of a million sorties, what we\'d like to do is bring it down
to two incidents. So if you include the bird ingestion that becomes
quite a pain in the neck. If it\'s a loss for the airline companies then
it\'s a loss also for the airport, economically speaking.

So we started to use another type of method. We were looking at the
\[FAA regulation 14 CFR\] 139 that is part of FAA that was your
document, in FAA, and what we did was we thought of a related method.
Every month we have different types of birds that we see, different
types of species and we wanted to first find out if they were migratory
or local birds and we wanted to find out what their size was in the food
chain and then we looked at the grass and the rats and the mice and
anything that was related, we did research along the whole chain, the
whole food chain and then we also researched the surrounding areas and
the people that lived there and we did some sort of teaching and
education. Some pigeons were also something that were a hazard. So after
all this research, we found out that what we wanted to do was we wanted
to talk to the local government to study the migratory patterns of them
and then we also wanted to charge \-- if we could change the food chain
pattern and we thought maybe we could change the fact of whether they
come here or they don\'t.

Your other question was about risks, what\'s our biggest risk. Actually,
airport safety we have, for Chinese safety we actually have two
characters as a translation for the word \"safety\". One is on which is
risk or any potential damage. And trend is like integrity without any
damage so there are two layers of meanings to us the word, safety, so
when we talk about one which is integrity safety is no risk, the other
is no damage. So all kinds of incursions on the runway or any kinds of
threat to aircrafts, we have a lot of statistical data and we have
evaluated all the damages, and the government has an analysis on human
damages and asset damages every year on all kinds of accidents and just
now you mentioned that I\'m responsible for budgeting and for strategic
development.

We have all kinds of records and data like that on hand, so every year
we can base our training plans on those information so that we can
mitigate risks. That is included in our plans. We also have a lot of
investment on safety. We\'ve done a lot of research behind these
investments. I don\'t know if I was able to answer your Spanish question
in Chinese.

MR. WILDING: Folks, that wraps up our time. How about joining me in
thanking the panel here?

(Applause)

MR. WILDING: And thank you very much for coming and for participating so
actively. Many, many thanks and have a good evening.

(Whereupon, at 4:33 p.m. the above-entitled matter concluded.)