Over the past 30 years, an increasing number of airports in the United States have installed crushable concrete buffer areas at the end of their runways to help stop overlanding planes before they can hit something. Miami International Airport, where an Amazon cargo plane overran the runway terminal on Sunday, killing five people and injuring five more, has no such cushioning. Engineered Material Arrest Systems, known in the industry as EMAS, have been installed at at least 70 U.S. airports since the 1990s and are credited with successfully stopping 26 planes that skidded off runways, carrying a total of 497 passengers, according to the Federal Aviation Administration. The FAA has recommended that airports install the buffers for at least two decades, stating in a 2005 advisory circular that the system had “demonstrated effectiveness in stopping aircraft overruns.” The agency said last year that “EMAS has operated successfully on all occasions, causing no loss of life and minimal damage.” However, the FAA has stopped short of requiring all airports to install the technology, determining that paved areas at least 1,000 feet long and 500 feet wide at each end of runways provide enough space to mitigate risks. In a statement, the FAA said Miami International met required length and width specifications for runway safety areas. “Should EMAS be everywhere at all airports? That will be a key part of our investigation,” Jennifer Homendy, chairwoman of the National Transportation Safety Board, told reporters Monday. “I don’t know that I’ve seen any airport that has a 1,000-foot runway safety area and an EMAS bed,” Michael O’Donnell, an aviation consultant who previously oversaw air traffic safety and airport security for the FAA, and signed off on the agency’s most recent update to its cushioning technology recommendations in 2012, said in an interview. “Now, this raises the immediate question: Was 1,000 feet enough in an accident like this?” They take up less space than traditional runway safety areas, with minimum requirements that they be as wide as the runway and, in most cases, that the portion containing crushable material extend 600 feet from the end of the runway. The FAA has likened the system to off-ramps that appear along steep roads to help stop runaway trucks. Federal funding initiatives have helped eligible airports defray the considerable expense of installing the technology, which costs several million dollars per runway. Since the FAA began exploring the technology, priority has been given to installing airports with geographic limitations that prevent them from building long buffer zones. In New York, for example, where airports are hidden in urban areas, buffer zones are a common feature. Kennedy International Airport became the first U.S. airport to install the system in 1996, and LaGuardia Airport followed suit, completing its installation in 2015 with the help of a federal grant program. The system most recently helped prevent a potentially catastrophic event this year, at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey, where it stopped a Learjet 60 that overran the runway. But at some larger airports like Miami International, where physical obstacles are comparatively far from the runways, administrators have not considered technology as a necessary element to improve safety. “No U.S. airport has EMAS at a runway end that also maintains the full, unobstructed 1,000-foot safety area,” Gregory Chin, spokesman for the Miami-Dade Aviation Department, said in an emailed statement. “EMAS is intended as an alternative, not as an additional layer on top of another.” He added that Miami International undergoes a comprehensive FAA safety inspection each year and has consistently met federal airfield safety requirements. “The priority for EMAS deployment will be those airports where the risks are greatest, and Miami would not be one of them,” said Michael McCormick, a professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University who previously led FAA air traffic operations. Miami International could still apply for federal Airport Improvement Program grants, which are funded through taxes on airline tickets and fuel, to help with a buffer facility or simply absorb the cost. Experts were not in complete agreement about how the system would have worked in Sunday’s crash at Miami International. “Looking at the speed at which the plane went off, EMAS may not have even worked,” said Scott Dunham, a former NTSB aviation safety investigator. He said Sunday’s catastrophic landing of the cargo plane was “far beyond what could be expected.” “The systems are designed to absorb the momentum of most aircraft, assuming they enter the buffer zone at speeds of up to 80.55 miles per hour. But according to the flight tracking website Flightradar24, the Boeing 767-300 cargo plane involved in Sunday’s crash was going nearly 128.9 miles per hour when it left the runway area, considerably faster than the cushioning technology was designed to counteract. The cargo plane It ended up about 1,300 feet outside the paved area, Homendy said, after colliding with a van belonging to an airport cleaning company, crashing through the airport perimeter fence and hitting an SUV traveling on a street near the airport. But some experts said they believed that if the damping technology had been in place, it could have slowed the plane enough to prevent some of that carnage. minimum, even if you have a big Boeing 767 gun on a runway going over 100 knots, it will at least reduce it,” McCormick said. “So it will minimize the risk of a collision.”
