The U.S. saw an average of 13 potentially catastrophic runway accidents per year from 2000-2009. That period coincided with an era of reduced flights after 9/11 and during the recession. Traffic is now expected to pick up over the next decade with an estimated 3 percent more flights annually.

“By being alert to this [new rule], [pilots] are much less likely to have a problem,” Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association (AOPA) Foundation President Bruce Landsberg said in a video posted at AOPA. Here’s Landsberg on the new rules and runway incursions in general:

The two reasons pilots have problems with runway incursions is either because they’re complacent. They’ve done it many many times – we are creatures of habit – or they’re distracted…

You have to say, “My job, right now, 100 percent is getting where the airplane where it is now now to wherever it is I’m going, either on the outbound leg or the inbound leg…”

Many of the areas where we have incursions, they don’t just happen to new pilots. They happen to very experienced pilots. Because

Without even realizing it, our abilities decline once we fail to get our recommended eight hours of sleep. Response times, decision-making, reflexes, mental focus and mood all begin to slide once a human begins building a sleep deficit. All the while, the propensity for risk-taking increases. In short, fatigue and sleep deprivation can put even the most highly trained, qualified and experienced people in an irrational state of mind. As one expert told News21: “It makes them stupid.”

As we examine fatigue in the transportation industry, we’ve found that the NTSB has issued repeated recommendations to regulatory agencies across all sectors, some dating as far back as the early 1970s. These recommendations have largely been ignored.

In aviation, there is rarely, if ever, a single cause for an accident or incident. Often the circumstances are more like the links in a chain. Fatigue’s place in this chain is most often evident when something has gone wrong. It’s the decision or reaction to that first link in the chain where the real trouble can begin for a fatigued flight crew.

It was an element in the Colgan Air crash near Buffalo, New York that killed 50 people in February 2009. And it has been a factor in hundreds of other deaths over the years.

Yet little has been done to protect pilots, traffic controllers and the flying public from the one bad decision, on the one bad day a pilot or controller might have during an otherwise long and unblemished career.

The recommendations are fairly simple: Change the limits of flight and duty times for flight crews so that it takes into account modern research into sleep, fatigue and circadian rhythms.

While we wait for regulatory agencies to change the rules, a pilot is climbing in the cockpit after a fitful night of undiagnosed sleep apnea; or a controller peers into the glass of his scope with a few hours of sleep and a hot cup of coffee.

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If you have a story to tell or want to talk about fatigue or another safety issue related to transportation, contact charlie.litton@news21.com

The CBC reports that the pilot might have landed too far down the runway for the breaks to stop the plane before reportedly losing the front wheel and sliding on to the grass. Weather might also have been a factor, as light rain had been reported since late morning. The NTSB is sending a team to help assist the Transportation Safety Board of Canada with its investigation.

The exact factors which caused this runway accident are unlikely to come to light for months when an investigation is finalized. But what is clear today is that this incident will be added to the year’s growing tally of runway safety accidents and incidents, what aviation safety experts call runway incursions. Technically this incident was a runway excursion, when a plane leaves the runway during takeoff or landing, and this is the type of runway-related incident that makes up about 97 percent of all runway safety accidents according to a 2009 Flight Safety Foundation study. 

The problem of runway excursions is so substantial that the NTSB added a recommendation to it’s Most Wanted List of transportation safety improvements in 2007, as soon as it was issued. The NTSB wants the FAA to require all pilots to calculate an arrival landing distance assessment before every landing based on actual conditions expected at the time of landing, a la the rain at Ottawa’s airport today.

Evidence suggests that as air traffic grows, the number of runway incursions grow exponentially. As air traffic is expected to grow by an estimated 3 percent annually over the next few years. Suffice it to say this has experts, the Air Line Pilots Union, and the NTSB worried about runway accidents.  

Are you a pilot with a story to tell about an incursion? What do you think about the NTSB’s recommendation? Want to sound off on this issue? Leave us a comment or email Richard.Duchon@News21.com. And check out the other interesting stories we’re working on below.

Help me show people what a day in the life of a pilot is really like. E-mail Tessa Muggeridge at tessa.muggeridge@news21.com or tweet at her at twitter.com/tessa_news21. Follow the entire transportation project as it progresses here at national.news21.com.

The Egypt government disputes the conclusion reached through the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board’s investigation determining that pilot Gameel Al-Batouti crashed the aircraft on purpose, killing all 217 people on board. Investigators reached this conclusion after carefully reviewing data and audio recorders from the plane’s black boxes. Egyptian officials say there is no way the seasoned pilot, nearing retirement, would have committed suicide and mass murder, and they say a mechanical malfunction must be to blame.

The safety board uses this tragedy as an example of why it wants the Federal Aviation Administration to require video or image recorders in the cockpits of large commercial and even some small airplanes (click here to read the NTSB recommendation). With the help of images, they could conclude investigations faster and find out more, which means family members of those who die in plane crashes would have clearer answers, and sooner.

Some family members are still perplexed by the events of that night. Jim Brokaw, who lost his father and stepmother in the EgyptAir crash, founded Families of EgyptAir 900, and a website for the victims’ families to speak to each other about their loss. The site is no longer active.

In a National Geographic Channel program titled “Air Crash Investigation,” some family members talked openly about those they lost in the EgyptAir crash. The episode can be watched in segments on youtube (click here).

As the recipient of a News21 journalism fellowship, I will be reporting on the issue of image recorders in cockpits this summer, and I am searching for family members of victims killed in the EgyptAir crash to round out my reporting. There are other crashes that could have been better understood with image recorders, such as the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania during the 9/11 terrorist attacks, United Airlines flight 93. My hope is that those families might want to talk about the issue of image recorders, too. I also want to speak to families who have lost someone in a small, non-commercial airplane crash, but still aren’t entirely sure why because the plane lacked recording devices.

I understand this is a sensitive topic for these family members and would like to approach them with the utmost respect and kindness while also gaining enough information to write compelling and useful journalism. If anyone can help, please contact me by e-mail: stevie.mathieu@news21.com.

Front (L to R): Ben Giles, Charlie Litton, Stevie Mathieu, Jenn Brookland, Robin Schwartz, AJ Maclean.

Back (L to R): Ryan Phillips, Tessa Muggeridge, Ariel Zirulnick, Richie Duchon, Aarti Shahani.