A two-day aviation safety .summit held in Washington DC on 9-10 January produced a list of 70 safety recommendations for the US Federal Aviation Administration and the US airline industry.
The meeting, attended by 1,000 airline executives, safety officials, pilots and aircraft manufacturers, was held in the wake of four major airliner crashes in the USA. It focused on ways to improve safety measures and boost public confidence in the airline industry.
One speaker summed it up by saying that the meeting "...served more as a forum for discussion of continuing safety programmes. No technology initiative discussed at the event is new, but they are getting renewed attention".
The 70 recommendations emerged from six committees. For example, the technology group called for better airport-surface operations, reduced wake-vortex vulnerability and central de-icing pads near the ends of runways.
US National Transportation Safety Board chairman James Hall used the event to urge a speed-up in fielding Westinghouse Norden Systems ASDE-3 ground-surveillance radars and development of the Airport Movement-Area Safety System (AMASS) which is designed for runway-conflict alert. The ASDE-3 installations will not be completed until 1996 and the AMASS will not be in place until three years later, says Hall.
He also says that too many US airliners are flying with outdated flight-data recorders (FDRs), which offer a limited number of parameters compared to newer units. He asked airline executives "...to set a timely deadline to expand FDR parameters beyond those currently required by FAA regulations" for in-service airliners.
US transportation secretary Federico Pena says that the event serves as "a gut-check" in the wake of 1994's seven fatal airline accidents, which took 264 lives.
"Everything we know about these recent accidents tell us that they were, more likely, random events," says FAA Administrator David Hinson. The goal is for no accidents, but he believes that objective is unobtainable.
Source: Flight International
