The Teterboro Users Group (TUG) is hosting two online meetings to gather feedback from pilots to improve flight safety around New Jersey's Teterboro Airport (TEB), the nation’s busiest general aviation airport. It is working with Mitre Corp. to identify areas in TEB’s approach paths it calls “airborne hotspots” where there is unsafe separation between aircraft flying to or from TEB and those departing from or traveling to other airports in the surrounding busy New York City airspace.
Set for 1 to 3 p.m. EDT on August 26 and September 3, the meetings will focus on TEB hotspots and include data reviewed by Mitre such as altitude and location of each event, as well as resolution advisory (RA) type; relative direction and altitude of the intruder; whether the intruder was VFR or IFR; change in vertical course after the RA; crew response components in the cockpit; whether the aircraft entered class B after the event; separation at closest point of approach; and exemplar interactions.
The data comes from a study by the General Aviation Issues Analysis Team that over a three-year period looked at TCAS RA events at TEB, Seattle Boeing Field King County International Airport (BFI), and California's Van Nuys Airport (VNY). During that period at TEB, there were 101 flight operational quality assurance (FOQA) events, 900 surveillance events, and 223 safety reports.
From that data, it was determined that the intruding aircraft is most likely to be below, crossing traffic, VFR, and going somewhere other than TEB. Also, 35 percent of flights that changed vertical trajectory entered class B airspace, and 88 percent of simulated RAs maintained vertical trajectory (12 percent of aircraft, or 32, changed vertical trajectory). TEB data suggested most events have an intruder 500 feet below with a wide range of lateral spacing, while the south hotspot more frequently involves opposite-direction intruder traffic such as aircraft operating to or from Morristown Airport (MMU).