300 Airports Lack Runway Safety Margin

By LESLIE MILLER, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON – Nearly 300 U.S. commercial airports, including Chicago’s Midway, lack 1,000-foot margins at the ends of the runways that the federal government considers adequate for safety.

As a result, there have been several incidents in which planes have skidded across roads or into populated areas. One such incident occurred Feb. 2 at Teterboro Airport, where a corporate plane carrying 11 people ran off the end of a runway during an aborted takeoff, shot across Route 46 and slammed into a warehouse. Twenty people were injured.

That accident and others at Teterboro spurred Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., to sponsor a new law that requires airports with runways that don’t have 1,000-foot buffers to build engineered material arresting systems (EMAS) at the ends of those runways or to extend their buffers.

President Bush signed Lautenberg’s bill into law last week.

“My bill … will finally force these airports and the FAA to make these runways safer,” Lautenberg said Friday.

Airports have 10 years to comply with the law. So far, EMAS have been built at the ends of 18 runways at 14 airports. Little Rock, Ark., installed two after a 1999 crash.

In New York, EMAS have stopped overruns three times since May 1999 at Kennedy International Airport, including a Boeing 747 in January, according to the Federal Aviation Administration. La Guardia Airport also has EMAS and Teterboro plans to install two. Newark Liberty International Airport has adequate buffers and doesn’t need EMAS.

The FAA says 284 airports are covered by the law.

Runway overruns can be extremely dangerous. In June 1999, an American Airlines jetliner slid past the end of the runway in Little Rock, Ark., killing 11 passengers and injuring 86. The FAA began researching solutions to the runway barrier space problem in the 1990s and found that EMAS, which consists of a light, crushable concrete, causes an airplane to decelerate quickly.

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