Making It Safer

The record shows that, given the fallibility of man and his machines, airline transportation is remarkably safe. The question is whether the Federal Aviation Administration is doing everything possible to make air travel as safe as it can be. The recent collision of an Aeromexico DC-9 and a small private plane over Cerritos suggests that the answer is no.

That accident, which resulted in the deaths of at least 81 people, occurred when the small Piper plane strayed into forbidden airspace on the approach to Los Angeles International Airport.

The separation of airliners and small planes is not difficult away from airports, where the jets fly many thousands of feet above the lower altitudes used by small planes. The problem comes when the jets ascend or descend through these lower altitudes near major airports. This is especially true in the southern half of California, with its heavy air traffic and hazy skies, where three accidents involving small planes and airliners have occurred in the last eight years.

Federal air regulations already require all air-craft operating into or out of any tower-controlled airport to have two-way radios and to use them while in the control area. In addition, major airports like LAX and Kennedy Airport in New York have Terminal Control Areas that can be entered only by aircraft in radio contact with controllers and equipped with transponders that tell controllers their altitude as well as their lateral location. The Piper involved in the accident last month was not so equipped.

Several weeks before the Cerritos accident a letter from the FAA warned all licensed pilots in Southern California that incursions into the Los Angeles TCA were occurring more often. The agency now vows a strict crackdown on violators, and promises to require collision-warning devices on airliners. And it has ordered a task force to study what other measures are necessary to enhance safeguards against air collisions not just here but elsewhere in the country, too.

The need to do more than discipline errant pilots is already painfully obvious. One step would require all aircraft operating in congested areas such as Southern California to have devices that signal altitudes so that air controllers could spot any plane flying at the wrong altitude inside a control area that might pose the risk of an air collision.

Some overly complicated TCAs should be redrawn to make it easier for pilots to avoid straying into them. The FAA should also look into the possibility of providing buffer zones around TCA boundaries so that relatively minor equipment defects or navigation errors would not produce potential collision situations.

Most important of all, Congress should order the FAA to accelerate the hiring of additional controllers and to speed the purchase of equipment that is able to handle the workload in heavily congested terminal areas. As things stand, the Administration is dragging its feet on a system-modernization program--and hoarding an $8-billion surplus in the Aviation Trust Fund, collected from taxes on aviation fuel and airline tickets.

The nation should not have to wait for another tragedy before the federal government gets down to business on remedial action.