Latest evidence suggests that airports are not as safe as they thought they were, just as they are being called upon to handle traffic faster
There is no reason to suppose that European airport managements have been labouring under the delusion that their organisations were perfect, but there is gathering evidence to suggest many had not thought about what standards they should be meeting. The October 2001 fatal runway collision at Linate was the wake-up call, but how many were listening, and how many who did hear it hit the snooze button? Eurocontrol has just gathered disturbing statistics that suggest airport problems are more deep-rooted than the industry realised.
Linate is now one of those place names which - like Lockerbie - in the aviation industry evokes a disturbing event, not just a location. It is not the purpose here to go back in detail over the collision at Milan's downtown airport in which 118 people died, but to observe that the report on the event - published in February - provided a picture of an airport that saw its sole task as providing a facility that would keep people and aeroplanes moving. According to the detail provided in the report, neither the airport management nor the Italian aviation authorities seemed to have questioned whether Linate was doing this in a way that provided the travellers that used it with an acceptable level of safety.
As the supply of information into Eurocontrol's centralised safety reporting system rolls in from the airports and air traffic control sector - which had never had a safety information sharing system and in many cases did not even have a national system for incident data - it is becoming increasingly clear that there are other Linates waiting to happen. Eurocontrol, at its 27-29 October airport operations conference in Brussels, will be revealing that there is more than one runway incursion event in Europe every day. That represents a potential for daily ground collisions. It is unlikely that this is the only unpalatable truth the conference will reveal.
A brief examination of how the airports came into being, why they are there and who owns them sheds light on why there is cause to worry about how they are operated.
Aerodromes are located where they are because the terrain is sufficiently flat and they serve a nearby community or region. In the early days they were set up to meet the requirements of aviators and their aircraft, and gradually provided for increasing numbers of passengers. The International Civil Aviation Organisation drew up standards and recommended practices (SARPS) for airports in the 1940s and has updated them regularly, but it remains clear today that these are either not followed, or are followed very loosely. Variations in lighting and signage on airports is probably the most dramatic example of the degree of disparity from SARPS. Aerodromes are usually owned by a local body like a regional council or chamber of commerce, but in some cases they are owned by the central or federal government. A few have been privatised.
It would be good to be able to believe that major international airports meet international standards for safety, but Linate disproved that theory. Even if it were true, major international airports are no longer the only concern for rapidly increasing numbers of passengers. The low-cost carriers and point-to-point services are dragging formerly sleepy little local airports into the big time - or at least in that direction.
Another Eurocontrol revelation this week is predictions that demonstrate - not a major surprise, this - that airports are going to be the pinch-points constraining growth as the demand for air travel drives up the number of air transport movements by a factor of 2.5 between now and 2025. In that period, new air traffic management technology and methods will provide capacity in the sky that will exceed what the ground infrastructure looks set to be able to handle, and one of the effects of this is certain to be the increasing use of many of today's minor aerodromes.
Compliance with ICAO's aerodrome SARPS is a good place to start for airport safety, but it was not ICAO's purpose to provide for a combination of safety and high efficiency - for which read high air transport movements. That is Eurocontrol's job as it prepares to impose, via the European Commission's Single European Sky legislation, airport operating standards that will achieve both the safety and efficiency objectives.
So if there are airport managers who have not read the Linate report, and do not intend to send a senior executive to the imminent operations conference, they have clearly not got the message. They should get another job before an accident at their airports brings similar judgements down on them.
Source: Flight International
