Runway errors worry Aviation experts

Runway 29 at Newark Liberty International Airport is half a football field wide, and is marked by white lights on each side and down its center line and thus is hard to miss for an experienced pilot but the airport witnessed two major mishaps in the span of a week due to the confusion of the crew.

On Saturday evening in Newark, a Continental Airlines Boeing 757 took every one by surprise when it mistook a taxiway for the parallel runway and landed on it. Quite unusually, the taxiway was empty and no damage resulted.

Aviation experts said the incident last Saturday night highlights the potential for tragedy and the need for better runway safety technology. "It's an incredibly dangerous thing," said Justin Green, a New York lawyer specializing in aviation litigation and a former Marine accident investigator.

117 runway confusion cases (excluding the recent two) were found on searching records of the past decade.

"Being cleared to land on a different runway than the one you are flying the approach to introduces a whole new set of complexities to the pilots at a very critical time, especially when the landing runway does not have a precision approach," said Denis Breslin, an American Airlines pilot and spokesman for the Allied Pilots Association, the airline pilots union.

Aviation experts later said that the heading indicator in the cockpit shows, in compass degrees, which way the plane is pointed and to end up on the wrong runway, the crew would apparently have had to ignore it. Runways are named for their compass orientation.

According to Russ Halleran, president of the air traffic controllers union at Newark, one reason Runway 29 is not equipped with an ILS is that because of restrictions above the Hudson River and Port Newark to the east of the airport there is not enough airspace to get a plane's position established in time.

Runway 29 could be employed with two systems that employ Global Positioning Satellite technology, Halleran said. "We need to be proactive. It's something that needs to be done.”