The topic of declared distance has become more commonly discussed over the last few years as the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and airports work to meet the Dec. 31 deadline for all Federal Aviation Regulations (FARs) Part 139 airports — including some larger general aviation (GA) airports — to comply with runway safety area (RSA) requirements.
Many other GA airports are located in space-constrained areas near cities and are not required to comply with the Dec. 31 mandate to align with requirements of the international standard for RSAs or runway end safety areas (RESAs), as they do not have Part 139 operating certificates. However, they still are required by current airport design standards to have a proper safety area in place. Many of these other GA airports date from the 1940s and 1950s, when the RSA was not required.
At airports that are unable to create a full RSA/RESA, four options are available:
- Physically reduce the length of the runw…
