Eight months ago there was a serious incident above Ben-Gurion International Airport when two planes, one Iberia and one El Al, almost collided. It was another in a series of "near misses" that indicate serious safety inadequacies at Ben-Gurion that could lead to a flight disaster.
The Lapidot Committee, appointed by Transportation Minister Shaul Mofaz (following this incident) to examine aviation safety in Israel, presented its ominous findings in August. The committee wrote that severe safety inadequacies at Ben-Gurion result from decades of deterioration and neglect.
The committee found that the Civil Aviation Authority is seriously inadequate, and that Israeli aviation laws are "anachronistic and irrelevant." Hence the CAA operates under "random and flawed" guidelines, and the airspace that serves both civil and military aviation is overcrowded and improperly regulated.
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Control tower director Eylon Tal provided some idea of how bad the situation is when he described the control tower as "medieval." Indeed, the equipment, installations, operation procedures and supervision standards at Ben-Gurion are decades behind those of the Western world's international airports. "The technological developments in the aviation world have simply not reached Israel," the Lapidot report said.
Ben-Gurion is the only remaining Western airport where visual approaches are still the norm instead of an instrument landing system (ILS). A plane flies on a different flight path each time, leaving room for serious pilot error. This is what happened in the Iberia case - the pilots simply didn't see the El Al plane in front of them and cut short their flight path.
A special team of the the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which presented Mofaz with its findings three weeks ago, found there is a low standard for air traffic controllers, and that they do not receive adequate instruction and training.
Airplanes unfit to fly, whose pilots are not proficient in English, arrive at Ben-Gurion, but nobody prevents their landing because the CAA, which is supposed to supervise the landing airplanes, has an acute shortage of supervisors.
The control tower's location is problematic, and no cameras are installed near the landing points. It is impossible to see, for example, if a plane mistakenly enters the runway while another is on the approach to land, as happened a week ago.
Disruption of communications between the control tower and approaching planes by pirate radio stations "has reached an outrageous level ... unequalled anywhere in the world," says the Lapidot report.
If Mofaz doesn't act to fix the deficiencies at Ben-Gurion, as the Lapidot committee and the American team recommended, a flight accident appears to be merely a matter of time. The solutions are clear and even relatively simple. All it takes is a decision and determination to implement it.
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