Editorial: Hitting the skids at airports

Monday, Dec. 12, 2005 | 8:54 a.m.

Chicago's Midway Airport, where a Southwest Airlines jet skidded off a runway last week, killing a boy and injuring 13 other people, is among those lacking the 1,000-foot margin at the end of the runway that federal guidelines consider adequate for safety.

The Associated Press reported one day after Thursday's accident that Chicago's Midway is one of 300 commercial U.S. airports without such margins, which are designed to guard against planes running off the ends of runways.

Many are older facilities that lack room for expansion of runways because they have become hemmed in by residential and commercial development or were built next to bodies of water or other barriers such as steep drop-offs.

Federal Aviation Administration studies in the 1990s showed that adding 600 feet of a light, crushable concrete material at the end could significantly slow runaway airplanes, much like sand ramps slow runaway trucks on mountain highways.

A string of overruns, including one in 1999 in which an American Airlines jetliner skidded past the end of an Arkansas runway, killing 11 people and injuring 86 others, led to Congress passing a law this year that requires the 284 airports with too-short runways to build extensions or install the soft stopping material by 2015.

McCarran International Airport doesn't use the soft barrier material because it has some of the nation's longest runways, says Elaine Sanchez, McCarran's spokeswoman. The facility's shortest runway is 1.7 miles long, while its longest stretches 2.7 miles. The extra-long runways give planes the space needed to lift off the ground in intense desert heat, Sanchez said.

Still, that's little comfort to passengers who may have to pass through sub-standard airports on their way here. The Southwest flight that skidded out of control last week was en route to Las Vegas. We hope it won't take 10 years for larger facilities such as Midway to address this serious safety issue.