Parliament passed a bill on Friday to revise the civil aviation law to make communication skills training mandatory for all pilots operating at busy airports, including private and Japan Coast Guard aircraft.
The revision, which will enter into force within three years, was drafted in response to a fatal accident in January last year in which a Japan Airlines plane and a coast guard aircraft collided and caught fire on a runway at Tokyo's Haneda Airport.
The bill passed the House of Councilors, the upper chamber of the Diet, at a plenary meeting Friday after clearing the House of Representatives, the lower chamber, earlier in May.
The training in question, called crew resource management, will aim to improve skills for communication between the captain and the copilot and between the cockpit crew and air traffic controllers to prevent human errors such as runway incursions.
The coast guard already conducts similar drills independently, but the revised law will make the practice mandatory.
The law also stipulates the establishment of a runway safety team at each of the country's eight major airports, including Haneda, in which air traffic controllers and airline officials will discuss measures against incursions.
In an interim report on the accident released late last year, the Japan Transport Safety Board said that both the captain and the copilot of the coast guard aircraft thought that they had received permission to enter the runway.
Suspecting a problem with mutual confirmation procedures, the coast guard has revised its manual to ensure that pilots fully repeat instructions from controllers to confirm them between themselves.
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