Incursions represent "a highly dangerous situation," said Capt. William Mino of the Allied Pilots Association, the union for American Airlines Inc. "The chance of loss of life is so great that any of them is too many."

Since 1990, the National Transportation Safety Board has included stopping runway incursions as one of its five "most wanted" aviation safety improvements. The independent agency, which makes safety recommendations to the FAA, wants pilots to get immediate warnings of possible ground collisions instead of waiting on air traffic controllers.

Airports in Boston, New York and Las Vegas have experienced high-profile near-collisions since last summer, prompting heightened attention from safety officials.

In the incident at Las Vegas' McCarran International Airport, a controller confused two departure aircraft and cleared an Air Canada jet just as an America West plane was taking off.

If another plane is crossing a runway, "takeoff hold" lights illuminate to warn pilots to stop their departure. If a runway is unsafe for entry or crossing because a plane is taking off, runway entrance lights illuminate to warn pilots to stay away.

The system operates for every plane moving across the runway, not just when someone has made an error, said Jonathan Bernays, assistant group leader for surveillance systems at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Lincoln Laboratory.

"The response has been very positive, from pilots, air traffic controllers and airport operators alike," Mr. Figueroa said.

But the system hasn't been flawless. Some pilots have been reported to taxi over illuminated lights. Other concerns remain about pilots seeing the lights go off and moving ahead without clearance from a controller, though officials say that properly trained pilots have handled the system well.

The system's designers are quick to note that the lights were never meant to be a first-line defense but a tool that helps in case of human error.

"We have a very low tolerance for accidents," said Mr. Bernays. "You need a layered defense. The expectation of this program is it provides an independent backup to all of the procedures and training that currently give us a very safe system."

A Yukon government geologist was killed Saturday when he was struck by the rotor blades of a helicopter.

An official with the department said Bradshaw and a co-worker were being picked up by the helicopter when he was hit by its rotor blades. He apparently died instantly.

"He had about 10 years' experience working in the field with helicopters, so from that point of view it's really surprising that he would be involved in such an accident," said Rod Hill, who manages the Yukon Geological Survey.

Periodically, over the past several years, those of us who marshal around words and phrases for a living have taken a deep breath and decided to go ahead and dare to discuss in public the fact that the airline industry in the United States is - every hour of every day since the fall of 2001 - setting a new safety record no one thought possible: zero passenger deaths.

Airline pilots and flight attendants, meanwhile, tend to be just plain superstitious about such things, holding the vague belief that the moment we mention a safe flight record, it will most probably end in tragedy. And, of course, to be truthful in the extreme, there is a high likelihood that, regardless of how good we've become, somewhere, somehow in the future - and despite more than 50 million successful flights since 2001 - there will be another accident.

If you're still reading and not calling Amtrak, good, because there's a lot more you should know about this incredible safety record, starting with the fact that it is - absolutely no pun intended - no accident.

And it's also true that several other technological advances, coupled with "lessons learned" changes in procedures, have rid us of other human-caused accidents, while the type of mishap due primarily to structural or mechanical malfunction has become almost dinosaur-rare.

First, I should tell you about a highly successful little operation at Moffet Field in California, run by NASA and called the Aviation Safety Reporting System. Pilots and mechanics and anyone with safety information to share can and do send in detailed reports of near-misses and almost-disasters, as well as narratives of what went wrong - or what might go wrong in the future because of a perceived problem - and the ASRS team investigates the report, strips the reporter's name from it, and adds the details to a growing safety hazard database.

There are great advantages, especially to a crewmember, for filling out the ubiquitous ASRS reports, not the least of which is a limited immunity from FAA "enforcement" action when the report concerns an inadvertent human mistake. But it also gives aviation professionals a way to immediately alert everyone to a problem without fear of the problem being ignored.

Each grouping, when studied, gives a snapshot of the type of close calls and mistakes that are occurring out there every day - mistakes that fortunately have yet to metastasize into a major accident.

I promised you the behind-the-scenes revelation on why we've become so safe, and here it is: Tucked away in that ASRS dataset list is a category called "CRM & MRM Issues" - reports providing clear evidence that the primary reason we've racked up 4 1/2 years without a passenger death in the U.S. is a thing called Crew Resource Management and Maintenance Resource Management.

In a nutshell, CRM is an absolute reversal of the iconoclastic cockpit culture we used to have up to the mid 1980's, and if CRM had been imposed on "Star Trek's" Captain Kirk, it would have cost him his command.

CRM changed all that. The principles grew from a series of catastrophic crashes in the seventies in which the major causal factors revolved around one imperfect human mind controlling every decision in a culture that discouraged comment or correction.

CRM training - a pioneering effort to change the Captain Kirk syndrome and begun bravely by United Airlines in 1983 - essentially overhauled the cockpit culture. It told captains that if they weren't willing and able to encourage and maintain constant, non-confrontational input from all of their subordinate crewmembers, they could go fly for someone else.

At the same time, CRM training taught subordinate copilots and flight engineers and, later, flight attendants that they were co-equally responsible for the safety of everyone aboard, and that it was no less than their job to speak up and keep on speaking up if they saw a safety problem or an unsafe decision, especially if the captain was refusing to reconsider.

This was a huge cultural alteration, and like all cultural changes in a well-established human system, it didn't "take" without tremendous effort and many years of firm, determined training and the absolute unwavering support of everyone from the CEO through the training captains on down.

Today, however, there are no captains out there who can expect to keep their command very long by ignoring their junior officers because the culture has changed utterly to one of true teamwork, featuring multiple minds helping with each decision and double-checking against inevitable human error.

And the proof? Well, that new culture is what you see reflected over and over again in today's ASRS narratives. Fifteen years ago, the ASRS folks were receiving an increasing number of surprising narratives telling how CRM had saved the day. Today, it's the deviations from the CRM norm that are rare enough to merit their own category in the ASRS system.

In other words, what you see when you read those reports - and please do, anyone can go through them - are crewmembers self-assessing the occasional failure to adhere to principles of open and timely teamwork.

Yes, some of our black boxes have made a huge difference. But the silent revolution in the commercial cockpits - taking us from the days of Captain Kirk's false omnipotence to today's atmosphere of teamwork and open communication based on the recognition that no one is perfect - is the primary reason we've achieved four-and-a-half years of perfect safety.

What's more, those same principles - now being applied to medical practice nationwide - will eventually have the same effect on human error in healthcare. In fact, the principles of CRM work spectacularly in any human endeavor from school teaching and nuclear power plant running to the operation of your average newsroom.

Although post-vacation blues is not officially recognized by the American Psychological Association, it is a condition that seems to affect many of us. Why? When we're on vacation – whether we travel or not – we escape our daily routines. We indulge ourselves and adapt a more a flexible lifestyle. Returning to the reality of work is a shock.

Here are 5 tips that may help you postpone the stress: