The Department of Transportation’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) is to examine the FAA’s Runway Safety Program in the light of a steadily increasing number of runway incursions and evaluate the agency’s progress in implementing initiatives to prevent further incursions.
Prevention of runway incursions and ground collisions has been on the NTSB’s “Most Wanted Transportation Safety Improvements List” since 1990.
The U.S. Air Force awarded Raytheon a $50.6 million engineering and manufacturing development contract to build mobile ATC systems capable of providing approach control guidance to military and other aircraft operating within a terminal airspace area. Raytheon will supply 19 mobile systems under the service’s deployable radar approach control (D-Rapcon) program; the overall contract value is approximately $400 million.
Signature Flight Support has resumed handling of all helicopter traffic into London Gatwick Airport, coinciding with the reopening of the helicopter aiming point (HAP) on May 3. The opening of the HAP after a 12-year hiatus allows operators once again to land helicopters at Gatwick without having to taxi on the runway. The new HAP is located at the end of Taxiway Uniform on the airport’s west side. Slots are still required for landing, and the HAP is for daylight use only when visibility is better than 1,500 meters.
The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey has agreed to pay the FAA $3.5 million in fines for numerous violations of airport rescue and fire fighting (ARFF) standards that occurred between December 2010 and June 2012 at John F. Kennedy (JFK), Teterboro (TEB), La Guardia (LGA) and Newark (EWR) airports.
One drawback to traditional round taxiway lights is the difficulty pilots often face in determining the precise location of the edge of the taxiway surface using those lights. The technology behind blue taxiway lighting has changed little over the past 50 years, until a recent test of a new kind of lighting fixture began at Ohio’s Cleveland Hopkins Airport (CLE) in February. This involves the new Pavement Edge Light Safety System (Pelss) from Lumin Aerospace.
The runway edge lights on four of the seven active runways at Chicago O’Hare International Airport (ORD) went dark on April 11 in the middle of an evening traffic rush. The runways affected were 22 Right, 32 Right and both 27 Left and Right, causing air traffic delays and flight cancellations. Some lights went out completely while others flickered for nearly an hour. A spokesman for the City of Chicago’s Department of Aviation said the cause of the outage is unknown.
Remember the spate of sleeping controllers and the angst it all caused at 800 Independence Avenue and 1200 New Jersey Avenue?
The ForeFlight team has released a major update to the ForeFlight Mobile iPad app–Version 5–featuring a new hazard advisor with terrain and obstacle awareness, new runway advisor features such as a traffic pattern advisor, runway winds and automatic display of taxi diagrams. The terrain map and Hazard Advisor work only on newer iPads (iPad mini, 2 and later) and iPhones (4 and later).
The FAA released guidance yesterday to the 149 airports whose contract towers are scheduled to close as a result of budget cuts that outlines the shutdown schedule and addresses what will happen to the tower structures and equipment.
All taxiways at Chicago O’Hare International Airport (ORD) once identified by a “Z” prefix have been eliminated as the City of Chicago continues toward the May 2, 2013 renaming of Runway 10-28. That runway will become 10L-28R in advance of this fall’s opening of the new Runway 10C-28C. ORD taxiways will now be identified with double letters such as “DD” or “GG.”
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