Short Runway, Bad Weather

Yesterday's skidding crash of a Southwest 737 at Chicago's Midway airport bears an uncomfortable resemblance to an incident involving a Southwest jet landing at Burbank in March 2000 [the link is to the NTSB report; fascinating stuff if you're a wannabe pilot like me]. Like yesterday's crash, the 2000 incident involved very bad weather. A more alarming connection is the similarity between the physical layout of the two airports. Both are relatively small, regional facilities, with runways of 6,500 feet or less that cannot be extended due to the presence of homes and businesses that surround the airports. Like the aircraft in the 2000 Burbank crash, the jet skidded off the end of the runway through a catch fence, ending up in the street outside the airport grounds. Unfortunately, while the Burbank airplane avoided tragedy by sliding to a halt mere feet in front of a gas station, the Chicago airplane struck a car, killing a child inside.

I've written before about short runways. I'm not a big fan. Landing at Burbank usually means that the aircraft is hard on the brakes and reverse thrusters all the way until it peels off to its assigned gate alongside the runway, less than 500 feet before the end of the runway. Bad weather quickly increases the difficulty of the landing, which must occur early over the field and requires hard braking under the best of circumstances. Short of installing walls at the end of airfields that would restrain (but heavily damage) a runaway jetliner, it appears that tragedies like this will continue to happen from time to time at busy regional airports that are too hemmed in by the cities around them to afford a safety buffer zone for runoff.