A federally funded safety initiative is helping McGhee Tyson Airport add tracking technology to vehicles in its fleet to let pilots and air traffic controllers better monitor activity on the Knoxville airfield.
McGhee Tyson will use $342,000 from the federal government, along with $38,000 of its own money, to purchase up to 100 transponders following a 2023 call to action from the Federal Aviation Administration seeking suggestions for improving safety. One solution was increased funding for this tracking technology, called Vehicle Movement Area Transponders.
Keeping operations near the runways running smoothly is a basic obligation for the airport, but it’s not simple.
"Any vehicle allowed on the airfield is a highly coordinated, highly trained,
highly organized affair," said Bryan White, the airport's VP of planning and development. The transponders, he told members of the airport's governing board Sept. 16, will help increase that coordination.
Reducing near-misses and crashes on airport grounds and in the air was a key goal of the FAA's 2023 safety push, but serious incidents still occur. In March, a plane at LaGuardia Airport in New York collided with a Port Authority fire truck, killing two people and injuring dozens. The plane had a transponder, but the truck did not.
The FAA had planned to install more of the transponders across its own fleet prior to the LaGuardia crash, but what happened in New York "accelerated" the move, FAA representatives said in a May news release. The FAA is advocating for airports and airlines to follow its lead and close "critical visibility gaps," FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said in the release.
With two runways, McGhee Tyson is home to the busiest airfield in East Tennessee, serving dozens of flights each day. The transponders will give pilots and people in the air traffic control tower information about the callsigns and exact position of vehicles moving around the Knoxville airfield.
While McGhee Tyson hasn't experienced a fatal crash in years, it is still interested in making its day-to-day operations safer wherever it can, airport spokesperson Becky Huckaby said.
"Having any additional layer of communications and safety procedures in place allows us to be safer out there," she said.
Unauthorized runway entries have occurred at McGhee Tyson in recent years. But those incidents, according to FAA data, were assessed as either "low-risk" or "lower-risk" scenarios.
Mariah Franklin covers growth and development in tech and energy. Email: mariah.franklin@knoxnews.com
This article originally appeared on Knoxville News Sentinel: McGhee Tyson Airport adding trackers to reduce risk on the airfield
