Government and industry members of the Takeoff and Landing Performance Assessment Aviation Rulemaking Committee (TALPA ARC) provided some welcome insights into their findings and recommendations for improving the safety of operations on contaminated runways at an October 2010 presentation to Boeing’s Performance and Flight Operations Engineering Conference. The presentation included a briefing on progress in developing a decision-making tool that is informally called the “Runway Condition Matrix.” The matrix enables the correlation of various criteria to prepare a runway condition report for pilots in readily understood terminology.
The TALPA committee was formed by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) following the Boeing 737-700 overrun at Chicago Midway International Airport in 2005 — and a subsequent attempt to mandate before-landing performance assessments that was dropped in favor of a comprehensive review of the safety issues involved in operations on contam…
