Airport Safety Issues - Essay Example

1 Airport Safety A Bachelor’s Degree Paper (if it is right) James Lawson (your name) Far Wright University (your university) 2 I. Airport Classification According to the 14 CFR part 139 Certification of Airports, Bangkok International Suvarnabhumi Airport is certified as a Class 1 airport because it is designed to for at least 31 passenger seats (scheduled large air carrier aircraft), and it satisfies the following requirements: undergoing recordkeeping and standardized personnel training; taking consideration of paved and unpaved surfaces in the airport; provision of safety areas according to the requirement in Part 139; appropriate provisions are made for lighting, marking and sign planning; a viable snow and ice plan is in place; adopting new HAMZAT handling/storage and ARFF regulations; proper emergency plan, traffic/wind indicators, self-inspection, and ground vehicle operations management; assuring public protection, NAVAIDS, obstruction, construction and unserviceable; undergoing airport reporting and wildlife hazard management (FAA, 2009). II Discussion Questions 1. Contracted Airports: The issue of some cash strapped cities selling their airports to private businesses has been in practice for many decades. However, this arrangement won’t hinder an airport from being certified (Wolfe & NewMyer, 1985). That is, a privately managed airport can still receive its certification if all safety precautions and FAA’s requirements have been satisfactorily put in place. Normally, the FAA officials often conduct elaborate inspections on airport facilities before recommending it for certification. 3 For the fact that an airport is being managed by privates businesses doesn’t indicate that the operational safety at the airport would improve more than natural or deteriorate. However, examples in recent years have shown that private owners of airports have invested so much in the airports with hope to make them attractive to passengers, and then make more money from other airport-related services (Wolfe & NewMyer, 1985). 2. Public Safety: Public safety can be simply defined as the processes undertaken by public and private establishments to protect the lives and property of ordinary people. At the airports, there are fire equipment, emergency medical aids staff and information staff to quickly help ordinary people that use the airport every time (Wells & Young, 2004). It is a good idea to have public safety procedures implemented at the airports because this practice would reduce the exposure of passengers to hazards and dangers. 3. Safety versus Security: It may true that there is sometimes an overlap between public safety and security at the airport. However, in a well-planned airport, the functions carried out by the public safety officials are usually separated from the security personnel (Wells & Young, 2004). This is to prevent a situation of confusion in case of an emergency. In practice, the functions of a public safety officials are different from the security personnel: while the former attend to emergency medical and psychological needs, the latter take care of screening 4 passengers in order to detect any threats that may affect passengers at the airports before departing and after arriving at the airport. On a rare occasion, an airport could have the same set of officials trained as both public safety and security personnel. But such an arrangement is not always nice because it does not encourage specialization. 4. Aircrew Training: Aircrew training is an important aspect of safety management in aviation industry. This provides an opportunity to provide the airline officials, airport workers and other aviation-related personnel their first practical experience about the industry. And this training is done nowadays by using simulators of all kinds (O’ Neil & Andrews, 2000). The main disadvantage of using simulators to train airline officials is that the physical challenge the officials would face as they actually fly a plane or work aboard the planes is incomparable to the one presented by the simulators. Therefore, there will always be problems of insufficient experiences, non-compliancy, psychological stress and the host of other problems. This is reason why there are still plane crashes even after subjecting the officials to rigorous training (O’Neil & Andrews, 2000). 5. Aviation Safety versus OSHA: Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) often encourages conformity with rigid safety procedures: on the other hand, aviation safety requires dynamic actions, some of which may not have been indicated in OSHA manual. Though it will be a great idea to have a synergy of sort that will combine both OSHA safety instructions with aviation safety procedures 5 with the hope obtaining a comprehensive safety measure for the people using the airport. 6. Cockpit Cameras: Having cameras installed in the cockpits may help other crew members or external supervisors detect when the pilots are messing up their jobs. However, such cockpit cameras may distract them from doing their normal jobs. 7. Employment: As a new Safety Director at an airport, I will carry out these functions in my very first week: assess the safety measures on ground; monitor the processes of implementation;, and finally interview experts on aviation safety at the airport. The second week would see me requesting for reform if the current safety procedures are inadequate and not modern (Wells & Young, 2004). Airport Winter Safety and Operations The FAA Advisory circular with the title, “Airport Winter Safety and Operations” is meant to encourage aviation officials to develop helpful plans, strategies, methods and procedures that would be executed in the process of safeguarding all operations at the airport during winter. Below are some of the techniques airport officials could use for safety purposes at the airports during winter: Instituting a snow plan: the contents of the snow plan would include but not limited setting up snow and ice control committee that would spearhead and 6 encourage snow-clearing operations, staff training and recordkeeping, weather forecasting and transmission of related information to the public. There are different kinds of snow and ice clearing that could be adopted: and it is also important that a good snow disposal system is put in place. Ice control, too, is very important: a practical means of removing ice from runways and other sensitive areas must be implemented. It is advisable to carry out routine runway assessment in order to discover the level of danger posed by snow and ice. To reduce the amount of snow on runway, runway friction would have to be improved and the report of the runway condition should be made available to all that require it. Enough information about the runway condition could be gathered from continuous monitoring of the runways. The two major actions described above may not work if there are no trained personnel to work on them. Hence, it is quite important that some airport officials be trained about how to control and remove snow and ice; how to dispose them off and how to undertake routine checks on the runway. Interesting that if these procedures highlighted above are taken into consideration, it will be possible to reduce the number of aircraft accidents due to slippery runway and/or other factors that may be linked to the presence of much snow and ice on the runway. References FAA (2008). Airport winter safety and operations. Retrieved from http://www.faa.gov/documentLibrary/media/advisory_circular/150-5200-30C/150_5200_30C.pdf FAA (2009), Part 139 Certification: Classes of Airport. Retrieved from http://www.faa.gov/airports/airport_safety/part139_cert/?p1=classes O’Neil, H.F. & Andrews, D.H. (2000). Aircrew training and assessment. London: Routledge. Wells, A.T. & Young, S. B. (2004). Airport planning and management. New York: McGraw-Hill Professional. Wolfe, H.P. & NewMyer, D.A. (1985). Aviation industry regulation. Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press. Read More