Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg Refers to ‘Splash’ in Air Accidents at FAA Safety Summit Addressing ‘Major Calls’



CNN

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg on Wednesday cited a “splash” in recent aviation accidents and called on attendees at an FAA safety summit to help find the “root causes” of the problem.

“We are especially concerned because we are seeing a spike in serious crashes at close quarters,” Buttigieg said in his opening remarks, referring to a series of close-to-collisions on US runways.

The summit comes after the FAA said it was investigating another close call between commercial airliners. The most recent close call was at Reagan National Airport near Washington, DC, the seventh since the beginning of this year.

On March 7, Republic Airways Flight 4736 overran the runway that United Airlines Flight 2003 was using to take off without clearance, according to a preliminary review, the FAA said. The agency said the United pilot had just been cleared to take off.

“The air traffic controller noticed the situation and immediately canceled takeoff clearance for the United flight,” the FAA said in a statement.

The FAA Security Summit in McLean, Va., is the first of its kind since 2009 and marked the beginning of the agency’s wide-ranging post-incursion security review.

Buttigieg said it was in the interests of aviation to determine “a very specific diagnosis and specific actions” to reduce the number of close encounters.

“It would be one thing if we found a certain technology in the cockpit or in the control room where there were a lot of problems,” Buttigieg told CNN. “But instead, we are finding that pilots, ground crews and controllers seem to be experiencing this surge. Some describe it as a type of rust.”

“We’re not going to wait for something even worse to happen to act now,” he told CNN, adding that the effort should lead to “making sure we can save lives at airports across the country.”

In his speech at the opening of the summit, which was attended by security investigators, industry representatives, union leaders and others, the transport minister said the meeting was about “the whole system, and therefore all of us.”

Buttigieg said Wednesday’s summit is the first in a series of coordinated events the FAA will hold to find out what works well and what “new steps” need to be taken to ensure safety.

Buttigieg said air travel has a high safety record and is the safest mode of transport, but “we dare not” take the record for granted.

The chairwoman of the National Transportation Safety Board told the summit that the safety agency had made seven recommendations on runway collisions that had not been accepted.

“One of them is 23 years old and still fit for the technology to warn pilots of an impending collision,” said Chairman Jennifer Homendy.

“How many times will we have to give the same recommendations over and over again?” she asked.

Homendy said she has already found one common problem with the six runway intrusions they are investigating. In each case, the cockpit recorder, known as one of the black boxes, was overwritten, preventing investigators from hearing what was going on in the flight deck.

“All federal agencies here today should be asking themselves: Are we doing everything we can to make our skies safer? We asked ourselves this same question in the NTSB,” she said.

Nick Calio, President and CEO of Airlines for America, the trade association that represents major airlines, said at the summit, “There’s always a constant self-assessment going on.”

Kalio said airlines are looking into their data to try to find ways to make aviation safer so close runway approaches like those being investigated by the NTSB do not occur.

“I don’t want to speculate much on what happened there, because they are all under investigation. And we’re all trying to figure out what’s going on. Is this a trend? Is this a pattern?” he said.

Rich Santa, union president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, cited a lack of personnel in the control towers as a potential culprit.

“Unfortunately, now we have a personnel problem, like air traffic controllers. Now we are 1,200 certified professional dispatchers less than 10 years ago,” he said at the summit. “It’s time for us to accurately and adequately staff the facilities.”

Acting FAA Administrator Billy Nolen told the summit that the agency “continues to hire” and plans to hire 1,500 controllers this year and 1,800 more next year.

The NTSB is investigating a series of runway incursions involving commercial airliners. Collisions on US runways have also prompted federal safety investigators to launch a massive investigation.

A Southwest passenger plane and a FedEx cargo plane arrived last month. as close as 100 feet from a collision at the Austin, Texas airport, and according to Homendy, it was the pilot, not the air traffic controller, who prevented the disaster.

In January it was alarm call similar to this last one. The Delta Air Lines flight was taking off from New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport when air traffic controllers “saw another aircraft crossing the runway in front of the departing airliner,” the FAA said in a statement.