Official Urges U.S. Action to Cut Aircraft Near-Misses
The chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, noting federal safety officials’ increasing concern over near-misses at the nation’s airports, urged the government Tuesday to take “firm action” to reduce the number of incidents.
In testifying before a Senate subcommittee, Jim Burnett encouraged the Federal Aviation Administration to study “deficient controller coordination or pilot errors which can result in dangerous” situations on airport runways.
More Controllers
In addition, he told a hearing of the Senate Commerce aviation subcommittee, the FAA might have to consider adding air traffic controllers and changing runway clearance procedures.
Burnett said that the safety board, which is conducting a special investigation, already has reviewed 20 incidents in the last five months.
He cited an incident last March in which two DC-10 jumbo jets passed within 100 feet of each other on the ground at the Minneapolis airport, as well as a scare last week at National Airport in Washington when an Eastern Airlines plane aborted takeoff to avoid colliding with a helicopter.
“I think it is a very somber time in aviation today,” Sen. Nancy Landon Kassebaum (R-Kan.) said as she opened the hearing on aviation safety.
Aviation’s Worst Year
But Burnett, who acknowledged that accidents worldwide have made this year aviation’s worst for fatalities, said people should not be afraid to fly.
“I certainly don’t think we have a crisis,” he said. “I think we have some things we need to watch and need to be doing in anticipation of an aviation industry that is going to continue to grow.”
Likewise, FAA Administrator Donald D. Engen sought to assure the subcommittee that the system is “healthy” and that the number of accidents has steadily declined over the last decade.
Engen warned against rushing to adopt a “do-something syndrome” in response to the series of recent crashes.
“The achievements in aviation safety are rarely accomplished by the quick fix,” he said, vowing: “I will not allow the system to become unsafe.”
Air Traffic Increasing
Nevertheless, increasing air traffic--the result of deregulation and economic growth--has generated concern about the experience of the nation’s 14,000 air traffic controllers. Most of them were hired after President Reagan fired most of the nation’s air controllers during a nationwide strike in 1981.
“Taking care of peak traffic takes seasoned controllers,” Larry Jones, who headed a special FAA task force on controllers, testified. “It’s certainly not yet a seasoned work force.”
Moreover, according to the preliminary results of a General Accounting Office study of 4,200 controllers, 69% of those surveyed believe that the heavy workload “is adversely affecting the safety of the system.”
According to the GAO, there are 5,000 fewer fully qualified controllers than before the 1981 strike, even though air traffic has surpassed prestrike levels.
At the hearing, Capt. Louis M. McNair of the Air Line Pilots Assn. called an FAA decision to hire 1,000 new controllers in the next two years “a step in the right direction.” But he cautioned that “it may be too little, too late” because of the relative inexperience of newer controllers already on the job.
Mineta Criticizes FAA
Meanwhile, Rep. Norman Y. Mineta (D-San Jose), chairman of the aviation subcommittee of the House Public Works and Transportation Committee, criticized the FAA Tuesday for being “merely reactive to aviation safety problems” and the airline industry for being complacent.
“There is too great a propensity on the part of our government and industry leadership to say accidents are simply a matter of bad luck or acts of God and (that) everything possible is being done to ensure safety,” he said in a speech to the Air Traffic Control Assn.
