Assessing the Effectiveness of Simplified Runway Status Lights

Runway incursions remain a persistent safety risk affecting both towered and nontowered airports. While new technologies and initiatives are continuously discussed and developed, high costs and complexities of implementation remain barriers to adoption. Low-cost runway status lights, enabled by new surveillance methods and simplified lighting systems, may bring an effective method of providing direct-to-pilot warnings of runway conflicts to the nontowered and general aviation airports that need them most. Using a flight simulator in a virtual reality environment, the author presented three different scenarios with and without simplified runway entrance lights to pilots, comparing performance within subjects, while assessing the effect of providing system information to participants between subjects. An adapted NASA Task Load Index and post-participation survey were used to answer additional questions regarding pilot perceptions of the runway entrance lights. This study found that simplified runway entrance lights reduce the risk of runway incursions in nontowered, no-traffic environments when a conflicting aircraft is difficult to see. These findings were consistent with participants’ general opinion on the benefit of runway entrance lights. Furthermore, the provision of system information was found to be important but not critical to system effectiveness. Studies on pilot trust and other components of the runway status light system are recommended, as are real-world trials.