Dangerous landings at Canadian airports a longstanding concern

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The Delta plane crash at Toronto’s Pearson Airport on Monday follows warnings about runway accidents from the Transportation Safety Board of Canada (TSB) since at least 2010.

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The TSB has called it one of the “issues posing the greatest risk to Canada’s transportation system,” as reported by Financial Post in 2015.

Delta plane crash lands and flips over at Toronto Pearson Airport; 8 injured including child

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TSB, an independent government agency that investigates accidents, said an average of 150 Canadian aircraft are involved in approach-and-landing accidents every year, in a watchlist published in November 2015. The agency further warned that the number has not decreased despite efforts by airports and Nav Canada, Canada’s civil air navigation service, to make runways safer.

“Operators, regulators and air-navigation service providers need to take more action to prevent approach-and-landing accidents, and to minimize the risks of adverse consequences if a runway overrun occurs,” the TSB said in a report on a 2015 Air Canada botched landing in Halifax.

Capt. Dan Adamus, who has been piloting commercial flights since 1985, said after the Halifax incident that while Canada’s runways are generally safe, there are some specific issues that need to be addressed.

The pilot said he’s also concerned that some airports in Canada still don’t comply with runway standards laid out by the International Civil Aviation Organization. Those standards require a certain amount of additional space at the end of a runway to protect passengers in case of an overrun, like the 2005 accident when an Air France plane missed the runway at Toronto’s Pearson airport and landed in a nearby creek.

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And both Capt. Adamus and the TSB have also pointed to unstable approaches — approaches at the wrong angle or the wrong speed — as another potential risk. According to the TSB, as many as 4 per cent of approaches in Canada are unstable, but the vast majority of those land anyway even though they should circle and try again.

In that 2005 Pearson incident, an Air France Airbus flying from Paris to Toronto had a rough landing. The aircraft stopped in a ravine “and caught fire,” said the TSB report from December of 2007. The plane was carrying 297 passengers and 12 crew members.

“The aircraft touched down about 3,800 feet down the 9,000-foot runway; it was not able to stop on the runway and departed the far end at a groundspeed of about 80 knots,” said the TSB report. “All passengers and crew members were able to evacuate the aircraft before the fire reached the escape routes.”

Weather conditions at Pearson during Monday’s incident were not immediately clear.

Low-level wind shear — a sudden change in wind direction or speed at low altitude — came under scrutiny after the Air France Airbus incident that saw two crew members and 10 passengers seriously injured.

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The report recommended Transport Canada “establish clear standards limiting approaches and landings in convective weather for all air transport operators at Canadian airports.”

A decade later, Transport Canada told the TSB that “there are no universal quantitative windshear avoidance criteria that provide unambiguous go/no-go decision guidelines, and that there is no assured detection and warning system in operation which can measure windshear intensity along a specific flight path.”

Wind shear whistleblower warns of dangerous landing conditions at Canadian airports

The TSB’s “recommendations on enhancing connective weather detection have largely fallen on deaf ears” at Transport Canada, where they cite a lack of international standards, John Gradek, who teaches aviation management at McGill University, told National Post in Dec. last year.

Hicham Ayoun, who speaks for Transport Canada, told National Post that the ministry has raised the issue at the International Civil Aviation Organization as far back as 2010.

“The result of these discussions was general agreement that any standard related to flight near convective weather in the terminal environment would require international collaboration given the potential operational impact of such a standard.”

In the meantime, keeping planes safe is up to the discretion of air traffic controllers and pilots, Ayoun said.

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