March 10, 2025
The FAA’s “From the Flight Deck” resource has grown significantly and continues to provide pilots and aircraft operators with real-life videos, diagrams with approach views for airports with confusing geometry, pilot handbooks filled with airport local knowledge, and other helpful information to improve safety in the airport environment.
“These resources are data-driven and use proven tactics for speaking to this under-reached community,” said Dave Alfano, FAA runway safety team manager. “We look at airports with a high number of runway incursions and wrong surface operations and develop resources to mitigate those risks.”
This video series, which includes footage captured by aircraft-mounted cameras, has grown to 140 videos. Covering airports in 40 states, as well as general topics such as phraseology, line-up-and-wait, wrong surface landings and more, the series surpassed 1 million views on YouTube this month.
“Pilots are watching these videos on their own time, and this milestone demonstrates the value the pilot community sees in the information,” Alfano said.
Arrival Alert Notices
Arrival Alert Notices (AANs) were developed to address wrong surface events at airports with a history of misalignment risk where an aircraft lines up to or lands on the incorrect runway, taxiway or airport.
AANs are graphics visually depicting the approach to a particular airport and language describing the misalignment risk to help increase awareness of potential hazards. Currently there are 60 airports with AANs, a significant increase from the original 11 that were rolled out as the result of the efforts of the FAA Runway Surface Safety Group (SSG) in early 2022.
“Business aviation may be particularly susceptible to wrong surface events given the industry’s frequent use of a variety of different airports,” noted Alex Gertsen, CAM, NBAA senior director of airport advocacy and vertical infrastructure and the industry co-chair for the SSG.
“AANs are a valuable new, graphical resource pilots can use during preflight and when briefing the approach, to know what to expect to see when descending into the airport environment and where the pitfalls lie,” he added. “This is a valuable tool at our disposal, along with dialing in the localizer or the RNAV approach and to using the extended runway centerlines on our electronic flight bags to avoid wrong surface incidents.”
Pilot Handbooks
Pilot Handbooks are developed in coordination with local air traffic controllers. They provide airport-specific cautions, information controllers want pilots to know, such as airport communications, airspace details and other preflight planning resources.
These handbooks are currently available for more than 80 airports nationwide.
Pilots, instructors and those involved in flight planning are encouraged to utilize the FAA’s data visualization tool, an interactive map showing locations of airports that currently have “From the Flight Deck” materials associated with them as part of their routine preflight planning tasks.
“It’s exciting to see how the FAA is leveraging emerging technologies such as aircraft-mounted cameras, video streaming and EFBs in creating these modern safety resources,” said Gertsen. “All of us, even those who do not leave the ground, play a role in elevating runway and surface safety, ensuring that flight crews are aware of these new tools and are utilizing them.”
International Business Aviation Council Ltd.