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Runway Incursion


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I'm wondering how often commercial air carriers have runway incursions? What prompts the question is an experience yesterday.  Flying United, we landed at YYZ (Toronto) on a left runway.  The plane taxied off to the right.  Then the next thing I know, the plane is locking up the breaks.  Looking out the window, the nose is probably just a foot past the hold short line for the right runway.   And lined up on the right runway is a 4 engine jet of some sort (maybe 747) getting ready to take off.  Less than a minute later, it takes off. --The most amusing part however is when the plane pulled into the gate. Not one person stood up before the seat belt light went off.  I felt like I dodged a bullet.  :)  

So, how often do runway incursions happen with professional crews at major airports? 

 

 

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It's incredibly rare.  And you saw the result of two well-trained professionals working together to prevent an incursion- one noticed the impending mistake and together they prevented the tragedy.

But when you are talking about doing 400 takeoffs and landings a year over a career that extends well over 20,000 hours, the window of exposure is pretty large.

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I was guessing the second in command was the one who hit the breaks.  I was half tempted to chat with the pilots,  and buy them a beer if they were done for the day, but I didn't want to interrupt anything and I had places to be.

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Probably not, but it's possible.  Normally after landing, the First Officer/SIC is usually pretty busy cleaning up the airplane and running the after landing checklist.  In your situation, my gut feeling is he glanced up, noticed the captain might not have noticed the runway hold short lines, and said, "HOLD SHORT, HOLD SHORT, HOLD SHORT!" prompting the slamming on the brakes.  And the Captain probably bought him a beer over dinner.

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Based on what a friend and 767 F/O tells me, the tolerance levels are very tight. He mentioned to me last year an incident where the wingtip of his plane crossed ever so slightly over the hold line and that freaked him out enough to file a report with NASA as soon as he was off duty. Since he never mentioned it again, I assume no report was filed by the tower.

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4 hours ago, flyboy0681 said:

Based on what a friend and 767 F/O tells me, the tolerance levels are very tight. He mentioned to me last year an incident where the wingtip of his plane crossed ever so slightly over the hold line and that freaked him out enough to file a report with NASA as soon as he was off duty. Since he never mentioned it again, I assume no report was filed by the tower.

it is impossible to see a wing tip or any part of your wing in the 767......at least the 200 and 300

Edited by Jim Peace
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21 hours ago, 201er said:

What if it were an Asian crew? Would there be loud beating noises coming from the cockp... I mean flight deck? Or would the first officer bite his tongue and wait for tower to do the poopooing?

Being married to an Asian and having an entire Asian family I take offence to your comment.

Stupidity and accidents cover all races, including yours.

Clarence

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This has been a hot topic with the FAA for years, and both pro's and bugsmashers are the cause of their ire. The pro ops include proper use of lighting to help eliminate a disaster when a RI occurs, and as bugsmashers, we could take a page from their playbook here. I think Ill write a short piece on this and put it in the Mooney flyer.

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From my seat, foreflight does a great job of helping out with situational awareness around runways. As soon as I point at a runway foreflight starts chirping, "approaching Runway 28" or whichever one I am heading towards. Mine is set up for it to display taxi diagrams as soon as I land and is the first thing that comes up when I start to move for departure. It doesn't take away from the required preflight planning but is a great piece of kit to have. 

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2 hours ago, M20Doc said:

Being married to an Asian and having an entire Asian family I take offence to your comment.

Stupidity and accidents cover all races, including yours.

Clarence

I don't think he meant any offense.  In the past, this was a well documented problem with airlines based in other parts of the world, including Asia.  Because of the culture, the Captain was just short of a god.  He could make no mistakes.  There were several cases of accidents/incidents where the FO saw something but said nothing.  They might hint, but they did nothing more than that.  Recently those airlines have seen the benefit of cockpit resource management and have pushed to make sure that no longer happens.

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1 hour ago, steingar said:

The commercial crews who fly in the US are amazing.  If we GA pilots were half as good we could all be proud.  But we never will be.  We don't fly every day, nor do we have training paid for by someone else.

...and 99% of the time, we are single pilot. 

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