ARI SHAPIRO, PRESIDENT:
The interim head of the Federal Aviation Administration addressed heated questions on Capitol Hill today about recent safety lapses, including near-misses on runways and the failure of a computer system that blocked flights nationwide.
NPR’s David Schaper reports.
DAVID SCHAPER, BYLINE: Alarm bells are ringing in Congress over a pair of near-aircraft collisions in recent weeks that have put hundreds of lives at risk. At New York’s JFK airport, an American Airlines passenger plane mistakenly crossed an active runway in the path of a Delta plane that was starting to take off. Air traffic control asked the Delta pilot to abort, and he did it safely. In Austin, Texas on a recent foggy morning, a FedEx cargo plane coming in to land crashed less than 100 feet into a Southwest passenger plane that was taking off. Both had been cleared by an air traffic controller to use the same runway.
In a Senate Commerce Committee hearing today, Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz played a dramatized video of that near-collision with actual recordings of the pilots’ communications with air traffic control.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Southwest 708, confirms on a shot.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: Rolling now.
SCHAPER: Southwest’s pilot confirms it’s starting to take off. When the FedEx pilot sees him, he demands that he stop.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: Southwest, abort.
SCHAPER: But it can’t.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: FedEx is on the move.
SCHAPER: FedEx pilot stops and avoids disaster.
Cruz then asked Acting FAA Administrator Billy Nolen how such a close call could happen. Nolen says it’s not yet clear what went wrong, as the investigation is still ongoing.
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BILLY NOLEN: It’s not what we expected to happen. But when we think about controls, how we train both our controllers and our pilots, the system works because it’s designed to avoid what you say could have been a horrible outcome.
SCHAPER: The other issue baffling Senators is the Jan. 11 failure of the NOTAM system, which warns pilots of potential dangers. That computer failure led the FAA to halt all departures nationwide for nearly two hours that morning, forcing airlines to cancel 1,300 flights and delay 11,000 more. Washington Democrat Maria Cantwell, chair of the commission, wondered how both the system and its backup could fail.
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MARIA CANTWELL: Truth be told, the FAA needs to have layoffs and not a single point where a key system failure can occur like the one we just saw.
SCHAPER: Acting Administrator Nolen says the agency has since implemented fixes and changed its procedures to prevent that outage from happening again. But Senator Ted Cruz pressed him on this.
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TED CRUZ: Will the fixes eliminate the risk that such a single point of failure could bring the system down? Is there redundancy built into it or a single nationwide ground air traffic error?
SCHAPER: Nolen replied that there are now layoffs and protections, but…
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NOLEN: Can I sit here today and tell you that there will never be a problem with the NOTAM system again? No, sir, I can’t. What I can say is that we are making every effort to modernize and review our procedures.
SCHAPER: Nolen noted that over the past decade, air travel in the United States has never been safer.
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NOLEN: But we don’t take that for granted. Recent events remind us that we cannot and must not be satisfied and must continually invest in our air system.
SCHAPER: To that end, Nolen is establishing a security review team of outside experts to review the systems, structure, culture, processes, and integration of the FAA’s security efforts as the agency continues its massive effort. to review and update outdated technology.
David Schaper, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript Provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
