The March runway incursion at Laguardia

 My comment on this video.

https://youtu.be/TYhksHOiPio?si=kdCIBqEuoVTGECgo

I have driven various vehicles on many US airfields.  At night, it is tough.  My training was to always coordinate with AT and then visually look for traffic when crossing runways because controllers make mistakes.

Transponders on ground vehicles is a fine idea, but many times, the vehicles are privately owned.  Better to have a system that requires no competence from vehicle.  I chased a contractor's truck across an airfield after instructing him to wait for me while I chained a gate.  He ignored me.  

I recall when ASDE (Airport Surface Detection Equipment) was first installed.  It failed often because it must distinguish between aircraft skin and ground (not sky).  Water in liquid or solid form reflects RF, thence targets fail to have contrast (bad S/N).  A much better system was proposed in an article in an IEEE journal: "RADAR on a chip" which has since been widely implemented to help automobile drivers be aware of their surroundings.  The article described experiments where these short-range GHz RADAR stationary horns were set up along runways and taxiways.  Those detections were of metal skin contrasted with sky, much better S/N.  This was primary only, yet the signal processing even back in late 80s, was able to distinguish ground vehicles from aircraft and aircraft type from aircraft type, primary skin paint only!!!

I wrote up a proposal to investigate the possibility of airfield surface RADAR as a superior method to ASDE, which was very expensive to implement.  ASDE sensors are typically mounted on top of  control towers, above the cab where controllers work.  It looks downward. 

I sent my proposal to switch to the multi-sensor airfield horn array to various peers in FAA and received no responses.

Planting a network of stationary horns around taxiways and runways that use so little power there is no health risk, feeding a central processor, could provide a vastly more redundant and reliable system at a greatly reduced cost.

The hold-short position at taxiway-runway intersections should be as automated as automobile traffic intersections.  The runway is hot on final approach and crossing prohibited unless controller overrides.  This is a very simple implementation and a major embarrassment that it's missing.  Doing this would remove a lot of radio traffic, which is the weakest link in the system.