Editorial: Avoiding a collision course

The National Transportation Safety Board's top official said this week that the federal government has been slow in outfitting airports with technology that could help prevent runway collisions among airliners.

A story by The New York Times reports that Mark V. Rosenker, NTSB chairman, made the statement at a conference on Tuesday that marked the 30th anniversary of a catastrophe involving two Boeing 747 aircraft. The planes collided on a runway in the Canary Islands, killing 583 people. Rosenker said although the aviation system has made improvements in overall procedures, near-collisions still occur on the nation's runways, and the Federal Aviation Administration should be quicker about installing equipment that could prevent such crashes.

FAA officials still are working to identify effective technologies and install them at major airports across the country, the Times reports. The systems being tested include stoplights on a runway at the Dallas-Fort Worth airport and a system in Long Beach, Calif., in which sensors embedded in the runway detect plane traffic and flash warnings to approaching aircraft.

FAA officials also have said that a system that signals air traffic controllers when planes on a runway are on a collision course with each other is "soon to be installed" at McCarran International Airport. McCarran has been a lower priority than airports that have poorer visibility or are in regions that experience worse weather than Las Vegas typically has.

The FAA's ultimate goal is to develop a cockpit device that uses Global Positioning System data to show pilots where their planes are in relation to others, the Times reports. But one aviation expert who spoke at the conference Tuesday said that, in the meantime, the FAA has failed to adequately coordinate its current field tests, and that has slowed installation.

It is understandable that the FAA would want to make certain that whatever technology is chosen will work under a variety of conditions. But the NTSB called for creation of a system to warn pilots of approaching aircraft in 2000.

More could have been done by now to improve the safety of our nation's runways.

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