An Affordable Approach to Runway Incursion Prevention

In the United States alone, runway accidents have led to the deaths of nine individuals from 2010 to 2020, all of which occurred at non-towered airports where air traffic control services are unable to provide traffic separation and collision avoidance. Despite this, most efforts in preventing runway incursions have been focused on towered airports. Numerous technologies have been proposed and developed to tackle runway incursions, but few have been implemented. Cost, hesitancy of adoption, and complexity of implementation have been identified as the primary barriers to implementation of these technologies. As a result of these findings, Simple, Affordable, Flexible, and Expandable Runway Status Lights (SAFE-RWSL) are proposed to provide a practical and feasible solution to the identified problems. Determined through a decision matrix, the proposed SAFE-RWSL system uses aircraft position information from Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) transmissions to wirelessly activate lights that indicate runway status to aircraft taking off and landing, and to aircraft, vehicles, and pedestrians using or crossing a runway. This system will supplement see-and-avoid and radio communications at non-towered airports and reduce the probability and corresponding risk of an aircraft collision because of a runway incursion. With an estimated benefit-cost ratio of 2.37 from the installation of SAFE-RWSL at nonhub primary airports based on a ten-year time horizon, the system promises to be a useful addition to runway incursion prevention solutions available to airports and aviation regulators.