Let’s talk about hot spots.
No, I am not referring to the Saturday night variety, but the ones that
can be found at airports. One of the
FAA’s hot buttons is runway incursions, and the designation of hot spots is an
effort to help you avoid becoming a runway incursion statistic. Before I dive into this topic, I want to give
credit to Steve Thibault for the idea for this article. Steve works with me in Sim Flite Minnesota
and recently gave an excellent seminar on using the iPad in the cockpit. This section on hot spots was presented in
his seminar.
Due to the format limitations of Blogger, you can read this article up on the Sim Flite Minnesota website, where the images are actually large enough to be seen.
Steve chose the downtown St Paul airport (STP) to use as an
example. It has a somewhat odd layout of
runways. This has no doubt helped create
some incursions. Below is the airport
diagram for STP, which shows the designated hot spot areas.
As you can see, it has two runways with similar
designations, runway 32 and runway 31.
This is almost a guaranteed recipe for incursions. There is a text description of the hot spots.
So it’s probably not the most useful of descriptions. But let’s employ another tool to get a better
idea of what a pilot will actually see and why it can be misleading. The picture below was captured using Google
Earth. The focus is on the H3 hot spot.
Now let’s zoom in for a much closer look.
Now the source of confusion becomes much more apparent. We’ve been taught from the time we were
student pilots to clear the runway before stopping to take care of
after-landing items. But look at where
the hold short lines are for each runway.
Confused over solid versus dashed lines?
Remember the following little saying.
Dash across the dashed lines
Stop solid at the solid lines
So let’s say you have just landed on runway 32 and the tower
tells you to exit on delta and hold short of runway 31. By the time your aircraft’s nose reaches the
hold short lines for runway 31, your tail might still be hanging out on runway
32. So remembering your flight
instructor saying “Get off the runway first”, you creep forward to get your offending
tail off of runway 32. And you have now
just committed a runway incursion, and the tower may give you a phone number to
call.
Today as pilots we have so much information available to
us. Google Earth allows you to actually
see your destination airport. And with
GPS and your iPad, you can even follow your airplane’s progress on a
taxiway. Bottom line? Don’t become an FAA statistic. Use today’s ever-expanding technology to help
keep you safe.
