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They have extremely bright runway lights that outline the runway. So no need to bother spending additional money maintaining a runway that’s any color other than tar black.
Note, they would need the runway lights regardless of the color of the runway. Because even a bright yellow runway would be very hard to see without any lights.
From the air a runway is pretty easy to spot during the day, it doesn’t really look like anything else. At night, the rotating beacon shows you about where the airport is from a log ways off. If the runway has lights, then it’s easy to see once you get close. If the runway has a VASI system then it’s really bright and tells you right/left and up down on the glide slope.
This is due to the materials used. Asphalt and concrete tend to be dark or dull colors. You can’t paint the runways, because it would a) get slick as hell and b) the paint wouldn’t last very long with all the traffic. Some kind of pigment or dye would probably be impractical from a cost benefit perspective… runways are fairly visible already due to the size, and lights already do a pretty good job of increasing that visibility
Colors are hard to maintain and patch under that kind of load, planes are VERY hard on runways given the weight, small contact patch and extreme braking. Reflectors and painted lines stand out especially well on black. So the guidance is those outlining the runway, not the surface of the runway itself. Lights and reflectors not actually being run over don’t take the wear and need replacing and the marks they do paint on are easier and faster to repair than a fully covered runway.
Runways are actually fairly ease to spot in good weather, you have to consider that things look very different from the air.
Search and Rescue planes for example can spot a fire from a long distance away because they can see the smoke where-as you can’t really see that from the ground. It’s a question of perspective.
In bad weather runways have reflective surfaces and a lot of lights so they are still very easy to spot
There’s no need for the runway itself to be a bright color
I assume the point of this question is “Why don’t they paint runways another color so pilots don’t accidentally wander onto the runway and cause accidents?”
The main problem is that runways get extremely beat up from all the traffic of heavy planes with black marking tires rolling over them.
They’d have repaint the runway constantly and if the runway appeared black (from tires or darkness) it would actually serve to *fool* the pilots into thinking it wasn’t the runway.
Additionally, runways actually have lights already to indicate where the runway is and pilots miss those too. And lights don’t have the wear problem that painting the runway would have.
And some incursions are caused by pilots thinking they have clearance to takeoff even when they don’t. So not all runway incursions are caused by “where is the runway?” Some are cause by “Oops I thought I was supposed to be here.”
Not all runways are black. There are concrete runways.
And as was said before, in the day, they already stand out enough no matter the colour and at night, the colour doesn’t matter as they are dark.
Yes, pilots miss runways (queue Harrison Ford landing on a taxiway here), but that has nothing to do with them being hard to see. Instead, the primary reason is confirmation bias.
Confirmation bias means that we tend to only see things that confirm what we already think is true and ignore all the evidence against it. A pilot may see a row of lights and think that’s the runway. They will then take all the signs that confirm their belief (it’s straight, long, paved, and in the region it should be) and ignore all the signs that say differently (no markings, no landing lights, no tower next to it, the computer warning about the plane not being near an airport, cars driving along it, …) until something happens that shatters their belief. Then they panic and do some really stupid stuff like turning off the engines.
That may sound extreme, but all those things have happened (just not all at once) in the past. Even with 2 people in the plane, decades of research into it, computer warnings aplenty, regular training, and so on, pilots still fall victim to confirmation bias.
Just recently, we had an accident where it seems like the pilots expected to hear “lineup and wait” but got told “hold short of the runway”, then read back “holding short of the runway”, but still thought they had been told “lineup and wait” and then did that. (This is just one possible explanation, wait for the final report to know what really happened.) (“lineup and wait” means “drive onto the runway, get into position, and wait for the to be told when to start”)
And BTW, finding the runway from the sky isn’t often an issue. Finding the airport first is the hard part. Your field of view is just so huge from up there that even a massive airport looks tiny. At night you look for a big black spot with a row of lights running through its middle. Then you pray you didn’t just hone in on a forest that has a road with street lights 😉 😉
Black stands out amongst green and brown. Maybe just think about things for more than two seconds
Never seen a black runway. They are concrete. Asphalt would deform under anything bigger than a Cessna.
They are black on the landing portion because of the rubber transfer from the tires.
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