Analysis of Aircraft Overruns and Undershoots for Runway Safety Areas

Abstract

ACRP Report 3: Analysis of Aircraft Overruns and Undershoots for Runway Safety Areas covers four areas: (1) Research collected on accident/incident data from several notable sources; (2) inventory of the conditions relating to each; (3) assessment of risk in relation to the runway safety area; and (4) discussion on a set of alternatives to the traditional run-way safety area. Overruns and undershoots are factors in the design or improvement of runway safety areas (RSAs). The traditional approach to mitigate risk associated with accidents or inci-dents is to enlarge the runway safety area, but many airports do not have sufficient land to accommodate standard Federal Aviation Administration or International Civil Avia-tion Organization recommendations for RSAs. Airports that pursue this approach face extremely expensive and controversial land acquisition or wetlands filling projects to make sufficient land available. This report uses a probabilistic approach—a quantitative assessment—to analyze the RSA and begins a discussion on how alternatives to a standard 1,000-foot RSA may ade-quately mitigate risk. The report also assesses the factors that increase the risk of such acci-dents occurring, helps with understanding how these incidents may happen, and suggests that aircraft overrun and undershoot risks are related to specific operational factors. The report suggests that significant improvement to airport operations safety may be achieved by monitoring and managing these operational factors for both RSA planning and during actual aircraft operations, and it provides recommendations for collection and reporting of data in future accident and incident investigations and reporting to allow future improvements to these models.