Description

On 5 March 2002, following the departure from runway 22 at Dresden in good visibility and light winds at night of an Aerospatiale ATR 72-200 being operated by an unrecorded airline on a domestic scheduled passenger fight from Dresden to Stuttgart, the airport operator found a number of damaged runway edge lights. Inspection of the aircraft after the flight disclosed damage to both nose landing gear tyres, one of which was deflated, and also found evidence of glass fragment impact with the fuselage and propellers, glass splinters in all landing gear bays and noted that the lower anti-collision light had been destroyed. There was no reported awareness of an incident on the part of the 27 passengers and two cabin crew.

Investigation

An Investigation was carried out by the German BFU. The aircraft DFDR was available but the Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR) was not downloaded (possibly because it was had only a 30 minute recording and had been overwritten).

It was noted that the 2508 metres long runway 22 at Dresden was of concrete construction and had a marked and lit surface width of 51 metres with adjacent unmaintained shoulders of similar but un-maintained concrete construction of 14.5 metres on each side. In effect, an original width of 80 metres had been reduced. All taxiways and runways were marked and lit in accordance with ICAO Annex 14 but the lighting intensity could not be varied by ATC. It was noted that the white centerline lights were hardly visible in a perpendicular direction from the edge of the runway to the centerline.