The current system of evaluating the severity of runway incursions, which emphasizes the horizontal/vertical distance between the aircraft (or other entities) at their closest point, disregards the overwhelming majority of incursions that are less severe but result from similar errors, according to a study by U.S. and Dutch researchers.1
The study — conducted for the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) by researchers from the FAA and the Netherlands Aerospace Centre NLR — concluded that a better method of evaluation would focus on the risks of various scenarios that occur at the beginning of a runway incursion.
Reporting and analysis of runway incursions are critical elements in the safety management of runway operations, the researchers said in their report on the study, published in the Reliability Engineering and System Safety journal.
Traditionally, runway incursions2 are classified according to five severity categories defined by the In…
