||| |—|—| | | | Pilots and controllers are doing a pretty good job of keeping airplanes apart on the runway. During the four-year period from 1997 to 2000 there were 266 million takeoff and landing operations at the country’s 459 tower-controlled airports, and only 1,369 of those operations involved a runway incursion. That means pilots or controllers only make a potentially dangerous mistake five times for every one million takeoffs or landings. Not bad.
But three of those mistakes between 1997 and 2000 caused fatal accidents. And the fact remains that the most deadly aircraft accident in aviation history was caused by a runway incursion when two Boeing 747s collided on Tenerife Island in 1977, killing 578. And just last fall an airliner on takeoff roll collided with a CitationJet in Italy, killing all aboard both airplanes.
