It has, however, committed to installing more runway status lights, which warn pilots at intersections when a runway is in use. The board also recommended requiring tower controllers to clear planes for each runway crossing, rather than simply clearing a plane to proceed from a gate to a runway end. But the F.A.A. has not agreed to that change.

Runway safety has loomed larger as a problem partly because other issues have been resolved. For example, in the last decade, all jet airliners have been equipped with systems that make it much harder to accidentally fly into a mountain or collide with another plane. Fire extinguishers and smoke detectors have been put in cargo compartments, and insulation that could feed an in-flight fire has been replaced.

But the technology gap that remains between the air and the ground is striking.

“You can fly an aircraft across the Pacific or across the Atlantic, and at any point in that journey you know where you are within about three meters, until you get on the ground,” said Randy Babbitt, a longtime airline pilot and former president of the Air Line Pilots Association.

In the air, big airliners have navigation systems based on Global Positioning System satellites, that locate them in the air, but these are not generally linked to surface maps, which would locate them by taxiway and runway. So an approaching plane can find a runway end in near-zero visibility, but can then get lost once on the surface.

“If you’ve got a G.P.S. in your car, you have infinitely more detailed information about where you are than in the cockpit of an airplane on the ground at Kennedy,” Mr. Babbitt said.

The most deadly aviation accident ever was the collision in March 1977 of two Boeing 747’s, on a foggy runway in Tenerife, in the Canary Islands, killing 583 people.

The F.A.A. recognizes the problem.

At the height of the American Airlines flight cancellations, on April 10, the associate administrator for safety, Nicholas A. Sabatini, was testifying before a Senate aviation subcommittee about his agency’s safety work, and while the senators wanted to hear about lapses in inspections, almost half his testimony was about runway safety.