We are approaching the first anniversary of the tragic runway collision at Tokyo Haneda that occurred on 2 January 2024. The facts that were public at the time make the problem plain: a Japan Coast Guard DHC-8 and Japan Airlines A350 were on the same runway during a landing, the airliner caught fire and was evacuated, and five of the six people aboard the Coast Guard aircraft died. That accident reset the global conversation about runway incursion defenses and how technology and operational discipline must work together.

If you fly for a living you will recognise the recurring elements in many runway incursion accidents. There is pressure on the flight crew to accept that a cleared-to-land runway is in fact clear. There is pressure on tower when traffic flows are heavy and controllers are managing intersecting departures and arrivals. And there is human fallibility: distractions, nonstandard phraseology, or complacency can make an automated alert go unnoticed. The Haneda event exposed all of those fault lines at once.

Technology is not a silver bullet, but implemented and trained for correctly it reduces the scope for human error. There are three hardware and procedural layers I watch closely.

1) Autonomous direct-to-pilot warnings on the surface. Runway Status Lights and similar autonomous runway incursion warning systems provide a direct, visual “stop” to flight crews and vehicle drivers on the movement area. These systems operate without controller intervention and are driven from surface surveillance feeds. Transport Canada and other investigators have documented how these systems work as REL, RIL, and THL elements and how they directly reduce certain kinds of incursion risk.

2) Robust surface surveillance and alerting for ATC. Systems like ASDE-X, A-SMGCS and modern multilateration or ADS-B based surface surveillance give controllers a continuous, fused picture of who is where on the movement area and trigger conflict alerts. They do not replace vigilance, but they supply the situational picture controllers need to spot an incursion early enough to act. The FAA and other agencies have long emphasised the value of integrated surface surveillance tied into alerting logic and into any RWSL implementation.

3) Procedural resilience and training. Technology will fail or be degraded. A history of incidents shows that local procedures, clear phraseology, mandatory readbacks, strict stop bar discipline and recurrent simulator drills for both crews and controllers are the measures that keep systems honest. International regulators and some states took the Haneda accident as a prompt to remind operators and airports to review stop bar use, readback standards and runway safety team practices. India’s DGCA issued a reminder circular after the Haneda incident that explicitly called out training, stop bar discipline and adoption of technology to improve situational awareness. Those are sensible, if basic, steps.

So what should Haneda and other high density airports push for in the next 12 months before the anniversary passes? Practical, pilot-centric recommendations:

  • Prioritise autonomous runway status lights for high risk runway/taxiway intersections. When implemented they provide a visual signal the flight deck can observe directly even at night or in low visibility. They must be coupled with training so pilots know that a red RWSL means stop even if ATC just cleared them.

  • Ensure surface surveillance fusion and aural alerts for controllers. A blinking icon on a screen is not enough if controllers are busy and alerts are soft. Alerting logic has to include unmistakable aural cues plus a clear, unambiguous display of the incursion location. This is technology plus human factors work.

  • Harden stop bar procedures and NOTAM practices. If stop bars are to be the primary physical control at a holding position they must be on 24 hours at high risk intersections or there must be a strict contingency SOP that requires verbal confirmation from a controller before any movement. Airports must publish and exercise those contingencies.

  • Feed operational change with investigation transparency. When an accident like the Haneda collision occurs, investigators and operators must rapidly share the narrow technical details needed to tune alerts and avoid false positives. Airports must resist the temptation to switch off an automated mitigation because it produced noisy false alerts without first tuning the system and retraining crews.

  • Train for the unexpected. Runway incursion drills that pair controllers, flight crews and vehicle drivers in realistic scenarios produce the behavioural changes you cannot get from a checklist. These must be recurrent and measurable.

The Haneda crash will be subject to detailed investigation outcomes from Japanese authorities. As of this article date those investigations were ongoing and the public record emphasised human factors and missed alerts among the proximate issues. This matters because the right mix of technology and procedure depends on the root causes. If the root causes include missed surface-monitoring alerts then upgrading alert ergonomics, adding RWSL style direct-to-pilot warnings and strengthening aural alerts for controllers are immediate, implementable mitigations.

Final note to fellow crews and ops managers. When autonomous runway alerts are present at an airport you operate into, treat them as primary. If a local controller clears you to enter or cross a runway and the red in-pavement lights are illuminated stop and read back. Ask for clarification and do not accept implied assumptions that a clearance means the runway is physically clear. That attitude is simple but lifesaving and it is the cultural change that must accompany any hardware upgrade. The tech helps. The habits save lives.