By Del Quentin Wilber
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 6, 2007

Air travelers face a "high risk of a catastrophic runway collision" because federal regulators have lost their focus on reducing the potential for such accidents, according to a report by congressional investigators released yesterday.

The report by the Government Accountability Office, the research arm of Congress, was highly critical of Federal Aviation Administration officials, saying their runway safety efforts have waned in recent years. The report also raised concerns about overworked air-traffic controllers becoming fatigued and making mistakes that could lead to a collision.

Democratic members of Congress, often critical of the FAA and the Bush administration, said the report reinforced their beliefs that regulators have not done enough to improve runway safety even though the issue has been in the public eye for decades.

"The failure to address issues of 20 years ago, 16 years ago, appears again in 2007," said Rep. James L. Oberstar (D-Minn.), chairman of the House Transportation Committee. "The FAA has not learned the lessons of the past."

FAA officials said they have worked hard to reduce the risk of runway crashes and collisions, which are considered among the most catastrophic aviation accidents. "Runway safety is one of the FAA's top priorities," officials said in a statement.

Runway safety has long been a focus of regulators, investigators and safety experts. Runways and airport taxiways are some of the busiest and most complex real estate in the aviation system. The world's worst aviation disaster occurred in 1977, when two jumbo jets collided on a runway on Tenerife in the Canary Islands, killing 583 people.

The two most recent fatal commercial jet crashes in the United States involved runways. A Southwest Airlines jet skidded off the end of a slick runway in Chicago and into a street, killing a passenger in a car in December 2005. In August 2006, the pilots of a regional jet tried to take off from a Kentucky runway that was too short for the plane and crashed, killing 49 people on board.

The GAO report noted that runway incursions -- incidents in which a plane or vehicle creates a collision hazard on a runway -- inched upward in the past fiscal year after holding steady since 2002.

There were 370 incursions in fiscal 2007, a rate of 6.05 incidents per 1 million tower operations. Such incidents peaked in 2001, when the FAA tallied 407 incursions, a rate of 6.1 per 1 million operations, according to the GAO report.

The most serious types of incursions -- those in which a crash was barely avoided -- dropped to 24 in fiscal 2007 from 31 a year earlier. There were 53 such incidents in fiscal 2001, federal statistics show.

FAA officials noted that only eight of the most serious incursions in fiscal 2007 involved at least one commercial aircraft.

The GAO pegged the rise in overall incursions, in part, on what it described as the FAA's faltering leadership. It noted that the FAA has not updated its runway safety plan in five years. The FAA also reduced staffing in its runway safety office, which went without a permanent director for two years until one was appointed in August.

Among other safety problems identified by GAO investigators: The FAA lacks reliable runway safety data, and its air-traffic controllers may be overworked. The report found that at least 20 percent of controllers at 25 facilities regularly worked six-day weeks.

The FAA said in a statement that it is "safely staffing all of its air traffic facilities" and hired 1,800 new controllers last year.