"Accident renews demands for larger runway buffer zones"

Saturday, December 10, 2005

Accident renews demands for larger runway buffer zones
The Associated Press


CHICAGO - A deadly accident in which a Boeing 737 slid off the end of a
snowy runway brought renewed demands yesterday for buffer zones or other
safety measures at hundreds of airports around the nation to give pilots a
wider margin for error.

In Thursday night's tragedy at Midway Airport, a Southwest Airlines jet
making a landing plowed through a fence and into a street, killing a
6-year-old boy in a car. Ten other people, most of them on the ground, were
injured.

The National Transportation Safety Board said the cause of the accident was
still under investigation, and the plane's voice and data recorders were
sent to Washington for analysis. But much of the attention focused on the
6,500-foot runway.

Like nearly 300 other U.S. commercial airports, Midway lacks 1,000-foot
buffer zones at the ends of its runways.

Midway, a compact one mile square, was built in 1923 during the propeller
era and has shorter runways than most major airports, with no room to extend
them because it is hemmed in by houses and businesses.

Safety experts say such airports can guard against accidents by instead
using beds of crushable concrete that can slow an aircraft if it slides off
the end of a runway.

The concrete beds - called Engineered Material Arresting Systems, or EMAS -
are in place at the end of 18 runways at 14 airports. They have stopped
three dangerous overruns three times since May 1999 at Kennedy Airport in
New York.

''Certainly Midway airport officials should have already been trying to come
up with something similar to this,'' said Jim Hall, NTSB chairman from 1993
to 2001. ''There's really no margin for error at the end of that runway.''

Hall said the lack of a 1,000-foot overrun area and the absence of an EMAS
system would probably be a key focus of the investigation.

''The bottom line is you have an increasing frequency of flights on a runway
with an inadequate margin for error,'' he said. ''It's a tragedy that did
not have to occur.''

Chicago Department of Aviation spokeswoman Wendy Abrams could not
immediately say whether an arresting system had been considered at Midway.

Though the airport had about 7 inches of snow, aviation officials said
conditions at the time were acceptable. And the plane did not appear to have
any maintenance problems and had undergone a service check Wednesday in
Phoenix, Southwest chief executive Gary Kelly said.

Southwest said the 59-year-old captain has been with the airline for more
than 10 years, and the 35-year-old first officer who has flown with
Southwest for 2½ years. It was the first fatal crash in Southwest's 35-year
history.

NTSB member Ellen Engleman Conners stressed that a variety of factors need
to be looked at before any cause is determined.

A recently passed federal law seeks to encourage more airports to build EMAS
systems or extend their runway barriers by requiring them to do one or the
other by 2015. There are 284 such airports with neither feature, according
to the FAA.

 Do you have an opinion about this story?
Share it with other readers in our CAA Discussion Forums

http://www.californiaaviation.org/dcfp/dcboard.php


*****************************************