A new Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) standard in the United States represents an ergonomic approach to preventing airport runway incursions, such as the crash on August 27 of a Comair CRJ-100 in Kentucky that killed 49 of the 50 people on board.
The pilots of the Comair jet had taken off from the wrong runway, a short spur reserved for small private planes. According to a USA Today article about the accident, pilots report that it is easy to mistake one runway for another, particularly at night or in poor weather. The newspaper noted that one of the top aviation risks in the country is planes straying into the paths of other planes on runways.
An article about the Comair accident in the August 30 issue of The Ergonomics
Report