A concrete safety bed put in for emergencies did its job Wednesday night at Virginia's Roanoke-Blacksburg Regional Airport, stopping a passenger jet that skidded off the runway in heavy rain. CommuteAir Flight 4339, arriving from Washington Dulles with 50 passengers and three crew, slid past the end of a 5,800-foot runway before being halted by what's known as an Engineered Materials Arresting System, or EMAS, the New York Times reports. The FAA says the Embraer 145 "landed long" when it arrived around 10pm.
The technology, a bed of crushable concrete blocks, is engineered to collapse beneath the weight of an aircraft, bringing runaway planes to a safe stop—provided they're not traveling faster than 80mph. Airport spokesperson Alexa Briehl called its performance textbook, adding that this was the first time Roanoke's system, which was upgraded last year, had been put to the test. No injuries were reported.
Developed in the 1990s for airports short on space to build standard safety zones, EMAS is now installed at around 70 airports across the US, including major hubs like New York's JFK and Chicago's O'Hare. The FAA says the technology has prevented more than two dozen runway overruns from ending in disaster, letting hundreds walk away unscathed.
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Earlier this month, the system paid off in two incidents on the same day, the AP reports, On Sept. 3, an EMAS system stopped a Gulfstream G150 with two people aboard that overran the runway at Chicago Executive Airport. On the same day, a Bombardier Challenger 300 with four people on board was stopped when it went beyond the runway during landing at Boca Raton Airport. No serious injuries were reported in either incident. "These two systems did exactly what they're designed to do—stop aircraft safely when they go off the runway," FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said in a statement the next day, per the Times. "This technology is making a real difference in preventing serious accidents."
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