Pilots' group names 150 airports with safety problems

Citation

(1999), "Pilots' group names 150 airports with safety problems", Disaster Prevention and Management, Vol. 8 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/dpm.1999.07308cab.001

Pilots' group names 150 airports with safety problems

Pilots' group names 150 airports with safety problems

Keywords Airports, Safety

International pilots have listed 150 airports with major safety problems and singled out 15 ­ including San Francisco and Hong Kong ­ that they believe are "critically deficient", The Sunday Times reported. The newspaper said it received a leaked copy of a report compiled at an April meeting of the International Federation of Air Line Pilots' Associations in Montreal.

The airport safety problems noted in the survey range from natural hazards to shortages of air traffic controllers to regulations that restrict pilots' manoeuvrability.

Unsafe

"If airports and airspaces are listed, it means they have serious deficiencies, not that they are unsafe," The Sunday Times quoted federation executive director Cathy Bill as saying. "There are potential dangers, but there are potential dangers when you get in any plane," she said.

Critically deficient

Other airports in the critically deficient category were: Nice, France; Wellington, New Zealand; Fornebu in Oslo; Suva in Fiji; Buenos Aires, Argentina; Leticia, Rio Negro and San Andres in Colombia; Maiquetia in Venezuela; Nauru, a central Pacific island; Lagos and Port Harcourt in Nigeria and Kabul in Afghanistan.

The Sunday Times said air crews have complained about landing at airports in popular tourist destinations, such as Greece, "to find inadequate runway lighting and no air-traffic controllers on the ground."

In San Francisco, The Sunday Times said, planes land in pairs on parallel runways, with pilots often relying largely on visual contact.

"It's been known for pilots to start aiming at the wrong runway and drift across in front of the other plane," it quoted an unidentified pilot as saying.

San Francisco International Airport spokesman Daniel D'Innocenti said the parallel runway situation was an approved manoeuvre.

"I'm sure there's an occasion when the pilot drifts into another runway," D'Innocenti said. "But there are so many safety valves involved. There's never been a time when it's an unsafe condition."

At Argentina's Mendoza Airport, it said, a pilot reported a horse on the runway. Another aborted a take-off from Buenos Aires after seeing children playing in his path.

The airport in Nice regularly requests planes make a circular final approach using a navigation system that can be inaccurate by hundreds of feet, the paper said. Although it has had few serious accidents, Hong Kong is potentially dangerous because of the proximity of the runway to a parallel taxiway ­ a situation that can be hazardous in crosswinds.

"I am disappointed that we are on the list," Nice Airport's director Danial Galibert told the newspaper. "The approach is more complicated than it used to be and the pilots hated it at first, but we have tried to get their support. We only use a visual approach in good conditions."

A British Airways spokesman said the airline was satisfied with safety standards at the airports it uses, including San Francisco and Hong Kong.

The director of Maiquetia airport, which serves Caracas, criticized the report. Concepcion Alberto Fuentes said that US officials checked conditions before a visit last year by President Clinton. "If there was any problem with security, the presidential aeroplane would not have landed," he said.

Safety problems

The meeting agreed to include Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport to the list of airports with major safety problems after a report claimed safety standards were being compromised because of noise restrictions, The Sunday Times said. Pilots say the restrictions force them to land in an area of severe crosswinds.

Airspace listed as potentially dangerous includes thousands of square miles in Africa, China and South America ­ and the North Sea because of the vast amount of civil and military traffic working for the oil industry below 10,000 feet.

(Lloyd's Casualty Week, Vol. 312 No. 12, 19 June 1998.)