Introduction
Airports’ safety is a multi-discipline focus that ought to draw multiple stakeholders’ efforts. Surges in airfield incidences affect an airport’s viability and place the facility’s management on a vicious trajectory where it could face financial and resource losses. Nevertheless, the critical issues that host vast safety issues include airfield ways, surface area management, and runway debris (Afzalzada & Misra, 2020). Airfield ways entail the paths through which planes land and may range from visual to precision instruments. Surface management involves monitoring planes that take off and those that land to avoid any possible collision. Runway debris includes foreign objects left on the runway, which could be parts of a broken runway. The following essay will focus on these three issues as they are the gist of airport safety.
Main Body
Airfield ways are an essential resource requiring constant focus, as they affect the passengers’ planes and ground support vehicles’ movement and efficiency. Seattle Tacoma Airport has seen massive growth in air traffic in recent years. However, the airport’s systems, particularly in managing airport ways, have not adapted to the growth in traffic (Afzalzada & Misra, 2020). The scenario above has, in turn, rendered the airport’s plans incongruently. To this extent, there have been increased incidences emanating from airfield mismanagement and obstruction issues (Tolstaya et al., 2019; Diana, 2018). For instance, there have been cases of airlines receiving misleading instructions to taxis on already occupied runways. Other pilots have received either contrasting instructions or impractical requests for taxiing to aprons (Tolstaya et al., 2019; Diana, 2018). For instance, a pilot could be ordered to taxi to a busy ramp with no clear exit for the occupant’s air vehicle.
With airfield ways such as the runway, ramps and aprons also being used by ground support vehicles, there has been congestion involving aircraft and ground-specific vehicles. The existential contradictions have led to several crashes, with subsequent damages to both types of vehicles and also causing injuries to staff operating such vehicles (Tolstaya et al., 2019; Diana, 2018). The incidences of the use of airfield ways point to the failure of regulations about the access of air-traffic-specific areas. Tacoma Seattle airport does not have sound policies regarding how to handle the growing air and ground support traffic (Afzalzada & Misra, 2020). Instead, the airport has been continuously trying to fulfill all flights on time, thus causing time, space, and resource constraints. The absence of an airfield ways management system will likely cause more safety issues in the future, therefore calling for the immediate expedition of a proper framework.
The second issue that poses critical operation safety issues at Tacoma Seattle airport is surface area management. In the last three years, there have been a growing number of incidences, particularly collisions between airplanes, ground support vehicles, and crews ((Dray, 2020). Such collisions indicate improper management of the airport’s surface area. Staff controlling planes and ground support vehicles along the airways could be relying on essential judgment limited by their line and scope of sight (Afzalzada & Misra, 2020). While such a review could apply to an airfield with few airplanes, it could result in further collisions and obstructions in the future and secondarily affect the efficiency of Seattle Tacoma Airport in the long run.
The third safety issue at Seattle Tacoma International Airport is runway debris. Runway debris is defined as foreign objects lined up on the runway. Foreign object debris is one of the most common sources of airplane mishaps and component damage. One of the most dominant examples of air mishaps from runway debris is the Concorde crash (El-Sayed, 2022). Seattle Tacoma Airport’s volume increase has also seen a surge in usage of the airport’s runway, including ground support vehicles. Such access poses a critical issue due to littering and will likely affect the airport’s viability if runway debris removal is not expedited seamlessly (Afzalzada & Misra, 2020). Debris on the runway also causes delays, which translates to late or transferred flights, affecting the airport’s efficiency.
Recommendations and Conclusions
Various actions should be expedited at Seattle Tacoma Airport if operation safety is to be bolstered at the airfield, as will be reviewed below. In airfield ways management, the airport must adopt measures to manage the airfield’s ways more seamlessly. During policies, ordinances, and regulations regarding airways use at the airport exit, the management ought to revise such artifacts, aptly contextualizing the ballooning traffic. The administration should primarily focus on stakeholders’ roles in the airways’ management crises and welcome their feedback. Such collaboration and ultimate concurrence will aid the airport’s management in developing policies and rules that are friendly to all. On surface area management, Seattle Tacoma International Airport should adopt more scientific methods of handling air and ground support crews. Such systems will ensure that space is utilized optimally and that there is increased efficiency by reducing obstructions, collisions, and probable crashes. Lastly, the airport ought to invest in technologies to aid in the detection of debris on the runways. Physical inspection of debris on the runway is time-consuming and could also be laden with the human error factor.
References
Afzalzada, N., & Misra, A. (2020). Streamlining Sea-Tac Airport via passenger simulation: Using complex simulation and modeling techniques, designers could understand the flow of passengers through the future international arrivals’ facility at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. Consulting-Specifying Engineer, 57(3), 34-39.
Diana, T. (2018). Can machines learn how to forecast taxi-out time? A comparison of predictive models was applied to the Seattle/Tacoma International Airport case. Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review, 119, 149-164.
Dray, L. (2020). An empirical analysis of airport capacity expansion. Journal of Air Transport Management, 87, 101850.
El-Sayed, A. F. (2022). Foreign Object Debris and Damage in Aviation. CRC Press.
Tolstaya, E., Ribeiro, A., Kumar, V., & Kapoor, A. (2019, November). Inverse optimal planning for air traffic control. In 2019 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) (pp. 7535-7542). IEEE.