Vice Chairman Bruce LandsbergConcurring Statement – Air Canada Taxiway Overflight InvestigationConcurring statements for SFO
This incident report should be required reading for all pilots. Only a few feet of separation prevented this from possibly becoming the worst aviation accident in history. I have some reservations about some of our recommendations where we may have gone farther than necessary in some cases and not far enough in others. Time will tell if we got it right.
Recommendation A-18-24 to the FAA on Preflight Information:
From a human factors perspective, the preflight briefing system is archaic and poorly designed. This Air Canada crew missed two warnings about the closed runway in SFO, first in pre-departure and secondly, via ACARS before landing. Concerns about legal liability rather than operational necessity, drive the current system to list every possible Notice to Airmen (Notam) that could, even under the most unlikely circumstance, affect a flight.
The current system prioritizes protecting the regulatory authorities and airports. It lays an impossibly heavy burden on individual pilots, crews and dispatchers to sort through literally dozens of irrelevant items to find the critical or merely important ones. When one is invariably missed, and a violation or incident occurs, the pilot is blamed for not finding the needle in the haystack!
GPS and TFR notices often fall into the same category of overly complex and geographically irrelevant. The legalistic descriptions of TFRs and poorly-descriptive GPS outage areas are worthless to pilots and dispatchers without tremendous and time-consuming effort. A graphic presentation of where a flight might be restricted or impacted should be easily found on FAA’s website and suffice as an official brief. It should also be disseminated to other preflight or electronic Flight bag providers and be both accurate and timely. FAA should not be allowed to hide behind FSS using this disclaimer which currently appears on the official FAA TFR website. “Depicted TFR data may not be a complete listing. Pilots should not use the information on this website for flight planning purposes. For the latest information, call your local Flight Service Station at 1-800-WX-BRIEF.”
VC Landsberg says 95% of what I was thinking.
My one addition would be to include runway lights will be off with all nighttime runway closure notams.