Why are airport runways black and not a colour that really stands out like pink?

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Answer 1

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 😉 😉