FAA Annual Runway Safety Report 2009
Air Traffic Organization Annual Runway Federal Aviation Administration 800 Independence Avenue, SW Safety Report 2009 Washington, DC 20591 2009-AJS-129 A Message from the FAA Administrator Dear Colleagues: We’re making progress on the issue of runway safety, but as an agency and as an industry, we need to do more. This report details the strides we’ve made over the last year. It also includes our next steps to take what is arguably one of the safest locations in all of aviation— a U.S. runway— and make it safer still. In the long term, runway safety is very, very good. Last year, we had 25 serious runway incursions. That’s out of more than 58 million operations. Serious runway incursions have dropped by more than half since 2001. Nine of those 25 serious incursions last year involved commercial aircraft. The 25 incursions were up one from the previous year, which was an all-time low. But the 2008 totals show that we must increase our vigilance. Last year, runway incursions of all types increased by some 13 percent over 2007, rising from 891 to 1,009. So far in fiscal year 2009, the data look promising with a projected drop in total incursions for the full year by some five percent and an accompanying reduction in serious incursions by at least 50 percent. These data are encouraging. But while the actual runway incursion numbers are still a very thin slice of overall operations, as an aviation professional, I believe that very good is still not good enough.
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