Runway accident puts focus on buffers

CHICAGO — A deadly accident in which a Boeing 737-700 slid off the end of a snowy runway brought renewed attention Friday to buffer zones and other safety measures at airports around the nation to give pilots a wider margin for error.

In Thursday night's accident at Midway International Airport, Southwest Airlines Flight 1248 from Baltimore/Washington International Airport, after landing, plowed through a fence and into a street, killing Joshua Woods, 6, of Indiana, a passenger in a car. Ten people, most of them on the ground, were injured.

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) said the cause of the accident was being investigated, and the plane's voice and data recorders were sent to Washington, D.C., 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, about 10 miles southwest of downtown Chicago, was built in 1923 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.

Systems installed

The concrete beds — Engineered Material Arresting Systems, or EMAS — are in place at the end of 18 runways at 14 airports; four other airports are close to completing installation. The systems have stopped three overruns since May 1999 at John F. Kennedy International 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.

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

But other safety experts said runway length should not be used as a scapegoat.

"It is not the runway length that's the issue," said Bernard Loeb, who was director of aviation safety at the NTSB during the mid-1990s. "Runways are either adequate or they're not."

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

Though the airport had received about 7.7 inches of snow Thursday, aviation officials said conditions at the time of landing were acceptable. 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.

Experienced pilot

Southwest said the 59-year-old captain has been with the airline for more than 10 years and the 35-year-old first officer has flown with Southwest for 2 ½ years. It was the first fatal crash in Southwest's 35-year history.

NTSB member Ellen Engleman Conners said the crew mentioned no problems with the aircraft before landing.

Air traffic controllers had rated the braking condition of the runway at the time of the accident as "fair" for most of the pavement and "poor" at the end, Conners said.

Investigators have not determined exactly where the plane touched down because it continued to snow after the accident. "We can't say X marks the spot physically, but we will be able to determine that through a simulation," she said.

Abrams said crews were removing snow and monitoring conditions. Tests had been done to determine how slippery the runway was about 20 minutes before the accident and that "the braking action was good."

When the plane touched down at 7:14 p.m., there was one-sixteenth of an inch of snow on the runway, said Patrick J. Harney, acting commissioner of the Chicago Aviation Authority.

The plane hit the fence 32 seconds after it touched down. The jet's speed was 152 mph as it landed. It hit the fence at about 46 mph, Conners said, and crashed into two cars.

Earlier, Conners stressed that a variety of factors need to examined before any cause is determined, including the crew's performance and how the aircraft handled.

"Often, the first guess is not correct," Conners said.

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.

In June 1999, an American Airlines jetliner slid past the end of the runway in Little Rock, Ark., killing 11 passengers and injuring 86. And it was only the speed of the passengers' evacuation — less than two minutes — that prevented serious injury or death when an Air France Airbus skidded off the runway in Toronto and burst into flames in August.

Associated Press Writer Leslie Miller contributed to this report from Washington. Material from The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times is included in this report.