Jim Carter wrote:

government or any of its agencies).

The fixes are already in place for what happened at LEX.



Other than the lighting, numbering, signage, and instruments in the
cockpit I'm not sure what "fixes" you might be thinking about. Sam, if
you meant those items I mentioned here, then we have to agree that they
still require passive human interpretation and are still being
overlooked or ignored. My solution isn't 100% complete, but I think it
might be closer than we already are.

I am not certain about the specifics of the FMS installed in the
accident aircraft. Lots of the modern systems show only the selected
runway. Thus, had the crew selected 22 they would have been leaving the
pavement, so to speak, as they begin their roll on 26. Also, had they
set runway heading on their heading "bug" it would have been pointing
some 49 degrees to the left. It has been common practice in air carrier
operations for many years to set the heading bug to runway heading. The
FAA issued a safety alert on September 1st reminding pilots of this
basic aspect of air carrier departure safety check (not to mention the
flight has to fly runway heading for some period of time after takeoff,
being IFR.

But, the fact they elected to roll on a runway without operating runway
edge lights rises to the level where no procedure could protect against
that.

The concerns of the industry are (correctly) about runway intrusions,
such as happen at places like LAX far too often.


I wonder if this solution could also be used to address runway
incursions by predicting movement of aircraft on the ground. Wouldn't it
be nice to be able to solve 2 problems with 1 relatively inexpensive
solution? That factor alone probably dooms the suggestion to oblivion.


Moving map airport diagrams go a long ways to preventing runway
incursions at airports like LAX. I suppose the flight plan/ATC
clearance system could be enhanced to highlight the authorized runway
and to show in red the prohibitd runways. For example handing on 25L at
LAX the runway could be green and 25R could be red. After landing
Runway 25R would turn green only after clearance to cross had been
obstained, But this would require repitious manual controller
intervention, and would almosr certainly fail like the runway traffic
lights tried at various times at various locations.

If the hold-short and crossing instructions were issued by datalink,
then perhaps it woould work reliably. Datalink should have replaced
routine voice communications many years ago. It was promised by the FAA
to be operational in the 1970s.