you may be interested in reading.
http://forums.airlinepilotcentral.com/showthread.php?t=2876New FAA Requirement: Reduce Safety (by John Carr, NATCA President)
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On March 20, 2006 a new FAA GENOT will go into effect which mandates a decreased margin of safety and an increase in delays and systemic capacity constraints. The GENOT severely limits or outright eliminates a procedure known as “Taxi Into Position And Hold,” or TIPH for short.
I guarantee you this GENOT will have an adverse impact on efficiency and safety of operations. Probably the biggest problem with the agency restricting the use of TIPH is that it will produce the opposite effect of what they are trying to accomplish, namely this action will derogate safety not improve upon it.
Without the ability to use TIPH at any airport where you depart aircraft between arrivals or shoot gaps with aircraft on converging runways you have now decreased the predictability aspect of the operation. A couple facilities have already conducted time tests and it had doubled the time it takes for an aircraft to roll from in position (40 seconds) to an aircraft not in position (80 seconds). That’s a lot in our world.
This loss of predictability makes it much more difficult to gauge the space required between arrivals for you to get the departure out, therefore the likelihood is that spacing on finals will have to be increased, once again decreasing capacity. At the same time---the FAA is doing all they can to increase capacity, by testing out the new TARP tool which would allow for compression to 2.7 miles on finals at busy airports. Seems to be contradictory doesn’t it? Compress the finals and then require departures to turn the corner before heading away from the other traffic?
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