These are the stories of airplane crashes that almost happened.
A Federal Express 727 landed on the wrong runway at Newark Airport in March 1993 nearly striking another Federal Express jet that was waiting for final clearance before takeoff.
A Continental 727's pilot got confused and turned onto the wrong runway of the same airport. A USAir 737 was hurdling down that runway for takeoff. The air traffic controllers thought they would collide. The USAir pilot thought fast and got enough lift to leapfrog the Continental jet.
Key source
These are some of the tales found by the Newark Star-Ledger's Ted Sherman. On Sept. 8, he published a package of stories that highlighted problems at the New Jersey airport. One of the key sources for his story was the Air Safety Reporting System, a database that can provide valuable leads about problems at your hometown airport.
The database is compiled by the National Aeronautic and Space Administration from anonymous reports filed mainly by pilots, air traffic controllers and others involved in aviation. The database started in 1988 as a way for those in aviation to report safety problems. Sherman is among those who have mined it to highlight near disasters.
Tricky data
The database is a little tricky. To protect anonymity, NASA strips out actual flight numbers and other identifying information. But it does include the month, year, location and other descriptive information. Sherman found that, in key cases, it gave enough clues so he could verify and figure out the details of those incidents. In some cases, the clues led him to stories in his newspaper's morgue. In other cases, he searched National Transportation Safety Board and Federal Aviation Administration records. But the NASA database underscored a key point - the NTSB and FAA are not a complete source for airline safety data.
Sherman also recommended, "search broadly, because of coding problems." He found, for instance, one type of problem coded several different ways. It was important to pay attention to how data could be entered into the database.
The key
One helpful way he approached the data was to slice out just those incidents involving Newark. However, even then he paid attention to the way data was entered into the system. He found that looking for his region, including metropolitan New York, revealed problems that involved Newark Airport. He suggested other reporters begin searching the database for the geographic area that interests them, and know which regional facilities to track. The key is looking at the facilities that affect traffic at your local airport. Again, pay attention to coding. Sherman found one New York radar facility reported two different ways in the database.
Biggest shortcoming
"The biggest shortcoming," Sherman said, "is air traffic controllers. They don't use it so much." He hoped to find more reports filed by them. Instead, he found, "pilots use it much more."
Many of the interesting nuggets lie in the database's text fields, where the reports include a narrative description of what almost went wrong. The database includes instances where pilots complain about the way things work at an airport, including bad runway designs or other problems that raise safety concerns.
Sherman obtained the database through a private company for $135. But, he cautioned, the interface on the CD did not permit easy transfers into FoxPro. He used Monarch in a time-consuming effort to get those text fields into a .dbf.
Andy Lehren can be reached at (573) 882-0684, or send e-mail to andy@nicar.org