Flight crew actions or failures to act were the most significant factors in fatal runway excursions, according to data analyzed by a U.K. Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) task force.
The task force was one of seven groups formed to address the top seven safety risks previously identified by the CAA. “The task forces were explicitly asked not to duplicate work but to identify where any additional safety intervention was required,” says the report on the initiative.1 The Runway Overrun or Excursion Task Force based its study and recommendations on “information [that] was already available from CAA data,” the report says. No specific information about the study period of the database is given in the report.
The task force looked at runway excursions from two angles: fatal accidents and U.K. mandatory occurrence reports (MORs).2 A runway excursion was defined for the task force’s purpo…
