The Crowded Ground Also Poses a Peril

While the crowded skies above Los Angeles International Airport have been recognized as among the most hazardous in the nation, it is on the ground--in the airport’s maze of runways and taxiways--where many accidents and harrowing near-misses have occurred in recent years, records show.

In June, 1989, a jetliner taxied onto Runway 25-Right for takeoff at the same time another jetliner was preparing to land on the same runway. The landing plane, which apparently was coming in on the wrong runway, aborted its approach to avoid a collision.

On other occasions, pilots have become lost on taxiways at the Los Angeles airport, strayed onto active runways and have landed or completed takeoffs while narrowly missing other aircraft on the runways, according to pilot and controller reports filed with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and reviewed Saturday by The Times.

Officials of the National Transportation Safety Board have warned repeatedly that ground accidents at busy U.S. airports, including in Los Angeles, pose a “high potential for catastrophe,” and they have placed a high priority on improving ground safety.

After the fatal collision Friday night between an arriving USAir jetliner and a departing SkyWest commuter plane, local pilots and others contended that, given the number of less-serious ground accidents and near-misses that preceded it, this catastrophe was only a matter of time.

No one had died in a commercial aviation accident at the airport since 1978, when a Honolulu-bound Continental Airlines DC-10 blew two tires and made an emergency landing after aborting takeoff. Three people were killed.

A handful of other instances have occurred more recently in which planes slammed or slid into each other while taxiing, but no one has been seriously injured.

The world’s worst aviation accident occurred on a runway in the Canary Islands in 1977, when two Boeing jumbo jets collided in fog, killing 583.

From the air, Los Angeles International is a relatively simple airport--two parallel sets of runways separated by the bulk of the airport’s passenger terminals.

But trying to safely place airplanes in sequence as they land and take off on those same runways can be a nightmare, particularly at peak hours such as Friday evening, air traffic controllers say.

All manner of aircraft, big and small, fast and slow, fly in and out of the Los Angeles airport. Coordinating them requires that controllers gauge how long it will take a departing plane to leave a runway to avoid another plane that may be coming in seconds behind it.

The potential for accidents, experts say, may be compounded by the fact that Los Angeles ground controllers do not always direct pilots to taxi to the ends of runways before taking off. Pilots of smaller planes, whose aircraft generally need less distance to get off the ground than larger jetliners, frequently are cleared for takeoff from runway intersections.

It was from such an intersection that the departing SkyWest plane turned onto Runway 24-Left, where it was struck by USAir’s incoming Flight 1493.

“That airport is known for this kind of problem,” said John Galipault, president of Aviation Safety Institute in Worthington, Ohio. “It’s an extremely busy airport, making it very favorable for aircraft to get out onto runways where they shouldn’t be.”

Last April, a report prepared by the Air Line Pilots Assn. concluded that the airspace around Los Angeles International Airport was among the seven most dangerous flight areas in the United States.

Pilots have found that being on the ground can be no less threatening.

The NASA reports, copies of which were recently obtained under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, show that in January, 1986, a passenger jet barely missed a small private plane that was awaiting takeoff instructions on the threshold of Runway 25-Right. The jetliner’s visibility was hampered by an early morning haze, but it was an apparent air traffic controller’s error that put both aircraft on the same runway at the same time.

“I phoned the LAX tower and was told that the light plane apparently had been cleared into position (for takeoff), and then they (controllers) had forgotten him,” wrote one of the jetliner crew members in his incident report.

In a December, 1987, incident, another disaster was narrowly averted when one pilot decided to extricate himself from taxiway gridlock--and steered into the path of an oncoming jet taking off.

“There were perhaps eight to 10 jets within a 1,000-foot radius of us at this time,” the pilot reported. “It appeared we were in a gridlock with no place to go except a taxiway to my left which I believed to be the outer taxiway.”

It was not a taxiway but an active runway. To make matters worse, communication with ground controllers was all but impossible because radio frequencies were swamped.

“To help her (the controller) out with her extremely busy workload, I took the initiative to take the turn to the left leading me back to what I thought was the outer parallel but was in fact the runway,” the pilot reported. “Simultaneously, we saw aircraft lights facing us.”

The pilot hastily turned into a green Tarmac area--safely off the runway--as the other jetliner roared into the night sky.

Only a few days later, another pilot reported taking off over the tail of a wide-body jet that he discovered was jutting out into the runway. The discovery was made too late to abort the takeoff, but as he lifted off the pilot veered left to increase his clearance.

“Had we lost No. 2 engine or blown a tire during takeoff roll, we might have struck that aircraft,” the pilot noted in his NASA report. “In our estimation, the tower should have had the wide-body taxi farther off the runway before clearing us for takeoff.”

Times research assistant Maureen Lyons contributed to this story.

How Fire Crews Respond to LAX Emergencies

Fire emergencies at Los Angeles International Airport are handled primarily by the city Fire Department. Crews and large emergency vehicles housed on the airport grounds provide the first response, and additional companies are brought in from outside the airport if needed. Here is a look at how firefighters responded to Friday night’s crash.

Within moments of the LAX collision Friday evening, Los Angeles Fire Department officials issued a major emergency alert for a “full assignment at the airport.” A special “CRASH” equipment truck and three large foam rigs housed at the airport responded immediately to Runway 24 Left.

As the fireball grew and firefighters began reckoning with the magnitude of the blaze, an additional 25 fire companies from throughout the city, along with nine rescue ambulances, were dispatched to LAX. More than 120 firefighters and 18 paramedics converged on the scene.

The blaze was “knocked out” within an hour, after firefighters first were hampered by a fuel leak and difficulty in reaching flames inside the fuselage. Most of the blaze was controlled by firefighters pumping tens of thousands of gallons of white bubbling foam over the burning wreckage, smothering the flames.

SOURCE: L.A. Fire Department