The Close Calls We Don’t Talk About

A Senate aviation subcommittee hearing held Tuesday arrived only days after a Delta Air Lines flight at Boston Logan International Airport executed a go-around as an American Airlines aircraft departed an intersecting runway. The moment fit the hearing title, “Close Calls: Improving Safety Across the National Airspace System,” and it gave lawmakers an immediate example of how thin margins can become on an active airfield.

Much of the discussion around close calls in aviation followed the expected path. Senators and witnesses talked about ADS-B In, runway status lights, surface surveillance, controller staffing, artificial intelligence and air traffic control modernization.

Then Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., asked a different kind of question. She wanted to know whether the official picture of near-miss risk is complete.

“I have a feeling there’s a lot more near misses or near tragic instances than what is formally reported,” Capito said. “Are you each satisfied with the data, the formal data that we see in front of us? And do you believe it’s collected properly so that we have the full-scale understanding of what is happening and what could possibly happen?”

While perhaps not particularly surprising to those of us in the GA world, the exchange that followed produced one of the hearing’s more useful admissions.

Chris Sununu, president and CEO of Airlines for America, said the data exists, although the public sees far less than the system records.

“The data is absolutely there,” Sununu said. “But there are many more, thousands more, near misses than are probably out there in the public and that get the headlines. There are hundreds of them every single day.”

The airport’s part of the picture

That answer may sound like a national airspace issue, and in many ways it is. At the airport level, though, it creates a more specific problem. Many airports are being asked to run increasingly sophisticated safety management systems (SMS) that identify hazards, analyze risk and put mitigations in place before an accident or other incident forces the issue. The airport operator owns or manages much of the physical environment where runway and surface conflicts develop. That includes pavement geometry, markings, lighting, construction areas, vehicle access points, driver training, ramp interfaces and local procedures.

An airport SMS depends on the airport having a reasonably complete view of what is happening on its own surface. That view can come from airport employees, tenants, air carriers, pilots, controllers, vendors, fuelers, maintenance providers and ground vehicle operators. The FAA’s own SMS guidance makes the point indirectly by treating hazard identification, safety reporting, data sharing and cross-communication among overlapping safety programs as core parts of the process.

Todd Hauptli, president and CEO of the American Association of Airport Executives, however, told the committee that airports do not always get the information they need.

“Senator, we have a concern and that is information sharing between pilots, air controllers, airports,” Hauptli said. “Airports aren’t getting all the information we would like to get. And part of that reason is because airports are subject to open record laws and FOIA requests. And so there’s a reluctance from time to time from other parties to share that important safety information with our members for fear that it will be published publicly.”

That information may be internally useful for learning how to “do things better next time,” but root problems are unlikely to be addressed if it is not shared with the airport.

The airport is usually the entity best able to change a sign, revise a driver-training emphasis item, adjust a local coordination process or identify a recurring surface hazard.

But according to Hauptli, the airport may also be the entity least likely to receive the full report if others believe the information could later be disclosed under public-records law.

Safety culture and legal exposure

AAAE describes the issue as a gap in airport SMS implementation.

“Airports are working diligently to create a culture that empowers and encourages all employees and industry stakeholders at their facilities to report safety-related observations and concerns, a foundational element of Safety Management Systems, effective mitigation of risk, and enhancing safety at airport facilities,” an AAAE spokesperson told AVweb. “Public record laws and the fear of liability and retribution disincentivizes data sharing among employees and stakeholders, leading to less reporting of issues, less collaboration, and increased challenges for airports and airlines to proactively address preventable risks.”

There is an obvious public interest in transparency around safety. Public airport authorities use public assets, public money and public trust. Accident investigations, airport certification and regulatory oversight cannot become sealed systems beyond scrutiny.

Even so, AAAE says it wants limits on how information collected through airport SMS programs can be shared.

“AAAE is urging Congress to prohibit certificated airports from disclosing data collected through SMS programs to persons other than certain FAA-certificated operators,” the spokesperson said.

The question, though, is whether raw hazard reports, internal SMS material and de-identified safety observations can be protected enough to preserve reporting while still leaving room for accountability.

That question has followed airport SMS for years. During the FAA’s earlier SMS rulemaking, Airports Council International-North America asked how the agency intended to protect airport SMS data in light of state and local sunshine laws. It also asked what level of participation the FAA expected from third parties if data submitted to a public airport could lose protection from public-records requests.

These questions are important in such a fragmented environment that really needs to be on the same page.

The FAA has its own safety processes. Airport operators have their own SMS responsibilities. Tenants and contractors have their own reporting cultures, business incentives and legal concerns. A runway surface does not care which organization owns the report that identifies a hazard, but in practice, the airport SMS process often does.

Unseen patterns

Near misses have a way of drawing attention because they are dramatic and finite. The event can be placed on a timeline and discussed in a hearing.

SMS is aimed at what came before that timeline. It is meant to capture weak signals, recurring confusion, procedural drift, training gaps, geometry issues and local operating habits. Tuesday’s hearing, beyond what it had to say about ADS-B and collision avoidance tech, served as a good reminder that airports may be responsible for managing some of those risks while receiving only part of the evidence.

That is not to say airports and those who operate on them should be shielded from scrutiny. Still, there needs to be a reporting structure that distinguishes between accountability after an event and candid safety sharing before one. Congress, the FAA, states and airport operators will have to decide where that line belongs.