The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has announced it is speeding up the testing and certification process for a class of technology designed to reduce the number of accidents and near misses on runways. The technology, which can display satellite-generated maps in cockpits, promises to help pilots avoid making wrong turns in the runway and reduces the risk of runway collisions. The technology takes an ergonomic approach to reducing one factor common to many of the incidents – confusion.

The worst of 2006’s accidents happened after confused pilots had made a wrong turn the runway. On Sunday August 27 a Comair CRJ-100 burst into flames in Lexington, Kentucky, killing 49 of the 50 people on board. The pilots of the Comair jet had taken off from a short spur reserved for small private planes. Jets are supposed to use a nearby 7,003-foot runway that is twice the length of the smaller one.

According to a news release from the FAA in March, knowing what runway or taxiway they’re on is critical information for pilots. That knowledge is especially important at night, in poor weather or when the crew is unfamiliar with the airport layout. Pilots have traditionally acquired information about their position by looking out their windshield. The new device provides a moving map display with “own ship position”

In recent years paper charts and manuals have increasingly been replaced by the Electronic Flight Bag or EFB – an electronic display system that gives pilots information about a variety of aviation data. These EFBs range from laptop-like devices totally independent of the aircraft that can be used on planes across the existing fleet, to high-end displays permanently installed and fully integrated into the airplane’s cockpit for newer aircraft. The new technology is a third type of device. Referred to as a “Class 2 system,” it is portable but takes its power and data directly from aircraft systems.

Most EFBs incorporate a feature called Airport Moving Map, a display that provides a constantly changing view of an airport’s runways, taxiways and structures to help pilots identify and anticipate the airplane’s location on the surface. Using the Global Positioning System (GPS), the moving map can show pilots their actual position (“own ship”) on the airport surface.

Since issuing its original guidance for EFB certification in 2003, the FAA has reviewed studies and human factors research on the systems. The research has shown that pilots had far better awareness of their position on the airport’s surface using an own ship position display. Recent tests also demonstrated that pilots typically glanced at the own ship display, then quickly looked out their windows to verify that information visually, eliminating one of the FAA’s major concerns that pilots would be “heads down” too long for safe operations.

With that data in hand, the FAA decided to streamline the process of certifying the own ship position function of moving map displays to give pilots the safety benefits on the airport surface as soon as possible.

An August 2006 article about the Comair accident in The Ergonomics Report™, a publication for subscribers with a professional interest in ergonomics, pointed out that many of the human errors described as causes in aviation accident investigations are the results of underlying factors. The catalog of factors includes poorly-designed systems, markers, signs and shift patterns. The article observes that accidents will continue until the habit of looking beyond errors for root causes takes hold. The FAA’s decision to streamline the testing and certification of ECBs is an instance of addressing the problem at the root.

Sources: FAA; The Ergonomics Report™