FAA Announces New Flight Regulations
Two and a half years after a crash that killed five people in Santa Ana, the Federal Aviation Administration announced Friday that small aircraft and Boeing 757s will have to stay farther apart while flying.
Small aircraft traveling behind 757s will have to stay five nautical miles away beginning today, instead of the previous four, the FAA said. The change is expected to reduce hazards caused by “wake vortices”--tornado-like winds created as a jet passes through the atmosphere.
Friday’s order came more than two years after the FAA was chastised by federal officials for ignoring prior warnings about the potential danger of wake turbulence created by 757s.
Although the FAA had maintained that there was nothing unique about the air turbulence created by the popular 757, the new rules essentially make a special category for the jet when it comes to separation distance.
In December 1993, a crash that occurred in Santa Ana as a corporate jet was attempting to land at John Wayne Airport behind a 757 killed five people, including the top two executives of the In-N-Out Burgers chain. A previous accident in Billings, Mont., took eight lives. At least three other serious incidents have been linked to 757 turbulence since December 1992.
After the Santa Ana crash, internal FAA documents surfaced that disclosed that the FAA had been warned for years that it should lengthen the distance between smaller aircraft and 757s, which produce powerful wake turbulence. At the time of the Santa Ana crash, the FAA required only three miles of separation between 757s and smaller aircraft.
Critics said the FAA was reluctant to increase separation because doing so could cause delays that could result in lost revenues for the airlines. At the time, the FAA said it had not taken action because there was no proof of a problem.
FAA Administrator David Hinson said Friday: “I am confident that the new wake vortex separation standards will improve aviation safety and move the aviation community closer to our shared goal of zero accidents.”
Wake vortices are tubes of rapidly rotating air--horizontal tornadoes, in effect--that spill off the wingtips of aircraft. The larger, heavier and slower the plane, the more intense the vortex.
The tubes of air rotate in opposite directions as air from the underside of each wingtip tries to swirl up and over. This counter-rotation can flip a small plane, particularly one that approaches the runway below a preceding plane.
The FAA has broadened the definition of smaller aircraft. Under the old rules aircraft were classified as “small” if they weighed less than 12,500 pounds. Under the new rules, aircraft less than 41,000 pounds--including the Cessna 152 and the Falcon 50--will be classified as “small.”
The weight categories for larger aircraft also were to change. A plane weighing between 41,000 and 255,000 pounds falls into the “large” category. The old standard was 12,500 to 300,000 pounds. A plane is classified as “heavy” if it weighs 255,000 pounds or more. Under previous rules, planes were “heavy” if they weighed at least 300,000 pounds.
This means that 57 aircraft that used to be classified as “large” now fall into the “small” category and must be kept at a greater distance behind larger planes--six miles behind a “heavy,” four miles behind a “large” and five miles if they’re flying behind a 757.
The new rules could have a significant effect at John Wayne Airport, where 757s and smaller planes mix on a regular basis.
Six months after the Santa Ana crash, in May 1994, the FAA increased the required separation between the 757 and other aircraft from three to four nautical miles.
In the summer and fall of 1994, a Department of Transportation report and members of a congressional subcommittee concluded that the FAA may have mishandled the 757 wake turbulence issue because it did not act in a timely fashion on warnings that came years before, including some from within the FAA’s ranks.
