A concrete safety bed stopped a plane that had lost control during a rain-soaked landing in Virginia on Wednesday, in what an airport official said was another example of the runway technology improving aviation safety in the United States.
The plane, CommuteAir Flight 4339, was carrying 50 passengers and three crew members when it skidded off a runway at Roanoke-Blackburg Regional Airport at about 9 p.m., said Alexa Briehl, an airport spokeswoman. No one was hurt
The plane was attempting to land at the airport’s 5,800-foot secondary runway in heavy rain, said Jason Kadah, a spokesman for CommuteAir. He said it was unclear what caused the plane, which had taken off from Washington Dulles International Airport, to overshoot the runway.
What’s more clear is that the aircraft was stopped by a bed of crushable concrete blocks. The system is designed to stop a runaway plane by collapsing under its weight.
“It performed as it should have,” Alexa Briehl, a spokeswoman for the Roanoke-Blacksburg airport.
The safety bed, known as an Engineered Materials Arresting System, is designed to stop planes moving at 80 miles per hour or less. The Virginia airport’s bed had been upgraded last year, and Wednesday was its first use.
The Engineered Materials Arresting System is in place on at least 120 runways at about 70 airports in the United States, according to the Federal Aviation Administration. The technology is also in use in other countries, including China and Spain.
The system was developed in the 1990s for airports where there wasn’t enough land to build conventional runway runoff areas to the scales required by the F.A.A. Such areas are mandatory in the United States, and some of them extend up to 1,000 feet beyond the end of a runway. But many of the country’s airports were built before the F.A.A. adopted its current runway safety standards in the 1980s.
In the United States, the safety bed system has stopped more than two dozen planes that overran runways, including at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport, Hollywood Burbank Airport in California and Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, according to the F.A.A. Hundreds of passengers and crew members have walked away unharmed as a result, according to the agency’s data.
On Sept. 3, safety beds stopped private jets during two separate runway overruns, according to the F.A.A. No serious injuries were reported in either incident.
In the first case, a Gulfstream G150 carrying two people overshot the runway at Chicago Executive Airport. In the second, a Bombardier Challenger 300 carrying four people went beyond the runway at Boca Raton Airport in Florida.
“These two systems did exactly what they’re designed to do — stop aircraft safely when they go off the runway,” Bryan Bedford, the F.A.A.’s administrator, said in a statement the next day. “This technology is making a real difference in preventing serious accidents.”
Mark Walker is an investigative reporter for The Times focused on transportation. He is based in Washington.
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