Guest Commentary: Making Our Safe Airspace System Even Safer
As chief operating officer of the FAA’s Air Traffic Organization (ATO), I was delighted to speak at ALPA’s recent Air Safety Forum. It was a very good opportunity to discuss the FAA’s safety efforts with our nation’s airline pilots.
The collaboration that exists between the FAA and ALPA has contributed to our outstanding safety record, and I look forward to continuing and strengthening that record.
We run an incredibly complex and safe airspace system. But as long as the risk of a safety problem exists, we have to be proactive. We have to identify potential hazards and correct them before a problem arises.
The FAA’s safety strategy can be summed up in three words: collect, find, fix. We collect safety data from many sources such as automated data-gathering tools and voluntary, confidential reports from air traffic controllers, airway technicians, and pilots. We use the data to find potential hazards, and we look at causal factors or unsafe trends that could contribute to a safety problem. We then fix these conditions through corrective actions so that we can mitigate the safety risk.
As part of this proactive approach, the FAA has many safety programs and campaigns. One that really illustrates our approach well is the ATO’s Top 5 Hazards List. Each year, we maintain a list of the hazards that our data analysis tells us pose the most pressing risks to the airspace system. On the FY17 list, we’re tackling hazards involving close encounters between IFR and VFR aircraft, NOTAM issuance and cancellation, NOTAM prioritization and filtering, runway flyovers, and aircraft landing on the wrong runway or taxiway or at the wrong airport.
After identifying these areas, we target them with multiple corrective actions, which are measured and monitored to ensure that they’re mitigating the safety risk as intended. This proactive approach works best when we involve our stakeholders to not only identify problems, but also share corrective solutions. For instance, ALPA works with us in many ways. It cochairs a national Runway Safety Council where we discuss safety issues like those on our Top 5 Hazards List. ALPA is also a member of our Runway Safety Action Teams at airports throughout the country. When we have pilot involvement and expertise, we can make better decisions to enhance safety.
As an example, in response to pilot concerns, the FAA deployed runway status lights at 17 airports. We’re now adding them to three additional airports so that more airports can benefit from this important safety-enhancing technology.
We’ve also started a campaign that stresses the need for controllers and pilots to collaborate on weather reporting. We’ve said that controllers should consistently share the weather information they have with pilots. And pilots need to report weather issues to controllers by submitting PIREPs.
With more than 14,000 controllers guiding more than 43,000 flights every day across our national airspace system, communication between air traffic controllers and pilots is of the utmost importance—and this includes face-to-face interaction in the cockpit through the Flight Deck Training Program.
Roughly a third of our new-hire controllers have never sat on a jumpseat in an airline cockpit and could benefit from this invaluable perspective. However, this stat is quickly changing as more air traffic controllers are participating in a redesigned FAA Flight Deck Training Program. The program allows pilots and controllers to exchange information during actual flight operations. Pilots can help controllers understand more about flight crew workload; the demands they face during taxi, takeoff, and landing; and the impact that changing runways or arrivals has on flight operations. Pilots can also learn more about the procedures, mechanisms, methodology, and phraseology that air traffic controllers use.
We’re continuing to take proactive safety steps as we modernize the airspace system through NextGen. We recently developed a performance-based navigation time, speed, and spacing plan as a new implementation method to deploy automation tools in geographical operating areas. We’re laying the foundation for moving to time-based air traffic operations. This will help us realize our longer-term NextGen vision of conducting trajectory-based operation, which will bring continuous use of precision approaches and safely increase predictability, efficiency, and flexibility into the national airspace system while minimizing the impact of disruptions due to weather or system or facility outages.
These are just a few of the many efforts that the ATO is making to reduce safety risk. We look forward to building on our collaboration with ALPA in the months and years ahead because together we’re making our safe airspace system even safer.
