FAA Requiring New Runway Safety Margins
A new FAA policy will require Part 91, 121, 125 and 135 jet pilots never to land where available runway is not at least actual landing distance plus 15 percent. If conditions deteriorate en route, pilots will have to recalculate actual landing distance and the 15-percent safety margin. If the total is more than the available runway length, they will have to land elsewhere. The FAA will make the policy mandatory by issuing OpsSpec/MSpec C082 by June 30. Operators will have until October 1 to comply. This policy derives from the Southwest Airlines 737 runway overrun at Chicago Midway last December. (The FAA failed to mention in the policy notice that, according to the NTSB, the 737 pilots delayed for 17 seconds engaging the thrust reversers and landed with a 10-knot tailwind.) Among the problems the FAA found: about half of aircraft flight manuals (AFM) do not require checking if there is sufficient landing distance at time of arrival, even when conditions deteriorate; operators apply safety margins inconsistently and might not add a percentage to actual runway needed; AFM data developed with test pilots is difficult to duplicate in real life; and wet and contaminated runway data is often calculated from a dry-runway baseline, not using actual performance on wet runways.

---

---

Pilot Held Responsible for Citation Overrun
On May 15 last year a Citation CJ2 (Danish registration OY-JET) landed 1,000 feet down the 2,948-foot-long runway at Bader Field in Atlantic City, N.J., and crashed into the water. There were no serious injuries to the four occupants. The NTSB recently released its final report and concluded the accident was caused by the pilot’s “improper decision” to land on a runway of insufficient length, to land on that inadequate runway with a tailwind and “his failure to obtain the proper touchdown point.” The Safety Board determined that the twinjet would have needed at least 3,750 feet of runway to land under the existing wind conditions and aircraft weight. Further, the published airport diagram for the airport–found attached to the pilot’s control column after the accident–contained the notation “airport closed to jet aircraft.” The same notation is in the FAA Airport/Facility Directory.

Many Factors Led to Fatal Hansa Jet Crash
The NTSB’s recently released final report implicates errors and FAR violations in the Nov. 30, 2004 fatal accident of a Hansa Jet moments after taking off. The crash killed both pilots, including the founder, owner and president of Toledo, Ohio-based charter operator Grand Aire Express. An FAA permit to ferry the twinjet from Spirit of St. Louis Airport to Toledo Express Airport contained several limitations with which the crew did not comply. The aircraft had not flown in the previous eight months and the pilot, prompted by an absence of airspeed indications, had aborted a takeoff about an hour before the accident flight. The pitot tubes were blown out but a required leak check was not made. Also, because the maintenance manager at Midcoast Aviation did not perform a post-maintenance operational check of the trim tabs, he failed to notice that the cables had been incorrectly reinstalled, the Safety Board said. The NTSB determined the probable cause of the accident was “the maintenance facility’s failure to properly install and inspect the elevator trim system, resulting in a reversed elevator trim condition, and the pilot’s failure to maintain terrain clearance.”