Runway Incursions and Incursion Prevention

Runway Incursions and Incursion Prevention

As we enter into 2023 with high hopes and expectations of ourselves and the world around us, it behooves us to stop and discuss the ecosystem within which we all operate. We are a collection of human beings who, despite our best efforts, make mistakes – mistakes that expose us to varying levels of risk.

In the risk management community, risk is largely assessed as a product of the probability of an event, as well as the severity of that event. To this point, we will often find that our day-to-day risks are relatively high-probability events with relatively low severity. Let us now consider, though, that your error was to accept an instruction or clearance onto a runway that was not intended for you. This type of mishap, known as a runway incursion, is an event that occurs rarely on the scale of probability but can have massive consequences for those involved. Such an example is the catastrophic collision of KLM 4805 and Pan Am 1736, both Boeing 747 aircraft, on the runway at Los Rodeos Airport, at Tenerife in the Canary Islands, on March 27, 1977, killing 583 people. The KLM pilot commenced their takeoff roll while the Pam Am aircraft was still taxiing on the runway in heavy fog, and the rest is an event marked as the worst aviation disaster in industry history.

In contemporary times, increased levels of air traffic coupled with a myriad of factors, make runway incursions a top operational risk to flight safety and require significant attention by industry stakeholders – yourself included.

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