Aircraft overruns a long-standing concern

The accident Thursday night that left a Southwest Airlines 737 stranded on a Chicago road after overrunning the runway revived long-lingering questions about landing larger jets at smaller airports, and what to do when those aircraft can't stop in time.

The accident comes just months after a similar crash at Toronto's Pearson airport involving an Air France A340 that skidded off a 9,000-foot runway into a ravine, and recalls similar accidents in Burbank, Calif., in 2000 and in Little Rock, Ark., in 1999.

"This is a problem that hasn't just started to occur. It's been a problem for a long time," said Grant Brophy, an air safety investigator and director of flight safety and security at Embry-Ridddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Fla.

The 2000 crash in Burbank in particular focused attention on runway overruns. As with Thursday's accident, a Southwest 737 overshot a wet runway — crashing through a fence and coming to rest just feet from a gas station. Two passengers were seriously injured. The National Transportation Safety Board determined the jet was coming in too fast and too steep.

The Little Rock crash occurred when an American Airlines MD-80 skidded down a 7,200-foot runway in heavy thunderstorms before plowing into a light tower. Eleven people, including the pilot, were killed.

Last February, a private jet at the busy Teterboro, N.J., airport aborted takeoff but shot off the end of the runway, through a fence and across a highway, struck two cars and ended up in a warehouse. Twenty people were injured.

Then in August came the Toronto accident. The International Federation of Air Line Pilots’ Associations, a coalition of commercial pilots' groups, was quick to rebuke airport officials for not having installed overrun safety measures, and noted that the issue had been "a point of contention ... for more than 25 years."

Though the NTSB routinely takes months to investigate such crashes, a major focus of the Chicago crash likely will be what details the flight crew had about the weather and runway conditions as it prepared its approach after waiting for some 30 minutes in a holding pattern over Midway.

"Given the conditions of last night, I think one of the big questions that has to be answered is how much information and what type of information did the flight crew have to make a landing at that runway?" says Greg Feith, a former NTSB investigator who investigated the Little Rock crash.

Southwest Flight 1248 landed Thursday night on Midway's runway 33 center, the airport's longest at 6,500 feet.  While adequately long for jets of that size, and even for the larger 757, such relatively short runways significantly narrow pilots' margin of error — requiring even more precise control of speed and descent rate, and a more precise touchdown farther up the runway.

That last factor became an issue in the Air France crash. Witnesses noted the plane touched down well past the standard touchdown zone, perhaps as far as halfway down the runway. It was not clear Friday just where the Southwest flight touched down.

Though air-traffic controllers provide weather and runway details to pilots, that data can rapidly become dated, especially when rain and ice are involved — and several minutes can pass between an initial report and final descent.

"Conditions can change in the blink of an eye, and I don't know how quickly that information can be delivered back to a flight crew," says Brophy.

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