The Federal Aviation Administration on Tuesday eased up on imminent plans to revise airport procedures aimed at reducing the risk of an arriving airplane flying over or landing on top of another plane waiting on a runway to depart.
The changes, which the National Transportation Safety Board had recommended to the FAA over the past six years, were announced last week and had been set to begin March 20, during the peak of the spring-break travel period.
The proposed tightening of rules governing how planes line up at airports for takeoff would appear to help prevent a rare type of accident that could cause hundreds of deaths in a single collision.
The FAA notice to airport air-traffic control towers last week said mistakes are continuing to occur involving planes taxiing onto an active runway when an approaching plane is about to land on the same runway or an intersecting runway.
On Feb. 17, a controller at Los Angeles International Airport directed three aircraft to use the same runway, the FAA said. A departing SkyWest turboprop was cleared to use a runway on which a Southwest Airlines Boeing 737 was about to land. The controller also cleared an Air Canada jet to cross the other end of the same runway.
KansasCity.com
The changes, which the National Transportation Safety Board had recommended to the FAA over the past six years, were announced last week and had been set to begin March 20, during the peak of the spring-break travel period.
The proposed tightening of rules governing how planes line up at airports for takeoff would appear to help prevent a rare type of accident that could cause hundreds of deaths in a single collision.
The FAA notice to airport air-traffic control towers last week said mistakes are continuing to occur involving planes taxiing onto an active runway when an approaching plane is about to land on the same runway or an intersecting runway.
On Feb. 17, a controller at Los Angeles International Airport directed three aircraft to use the same runway, the FAA said. A departing SkyWest turboprop was cleared to use a runway on which a Southwest Airlines Boeing 737 was about to land. The controller also cleared an Air Canada jet to cross the other end of the same runway.
KansasCity.com
