Flight Crew never go flying with the intent of having an accident. Yet, due to the nature of human error, accidents and incidents still take place and this can be due to any number of causal factors. Runway overruns and excursions are now the most type of common type of aircraft accident and featured as one of UK CAA’s top “Significant seven” safety risks.
The factors behind overruns can be grouped into three areas when looking to reduce the risk and harm from runway overruns:
• Aircraft performance / Flight Crew issues
• Reduced runway friction/contamination
• Overrun survivability
What overrun accident statistics do not show however, are the “near misses”, for example when aircraft took longer to stop than planned and safety margins were reduced, nor do they show of events that have left the aircraft disabled on the runway, which has left a runway closed for a period of time.
A runway closure after an accident or overrun costs airport and aircraft operators a substantial amount.
It can be all too easy to pin the blame on the flight crew in the event of an overrun. Poor piloting technique, including unstable approaches, long landings, late activation of braking/reverse, accepting a tailwind, an incorrect performance calculation, SOP non-compliance or excess speed on touchdown feature in many accident reports. So, why do flight crew to make errors like this in the first place? Were they fatigued, distracted or inadequately trained?? Did they have a lack of knowledge and awareness? Was there commercial or time pressure involved? Or did they exhibit poor decision making, where a go-around would have been a much safer option?
However, other factors may lead to the aircraft running out of available runway. It could be that the runway surface conditions were not as reported or expected. A lot can change in a matter of minutes following a heavy rain or snow shower, or a slight change in temperature. Accident data has shown that overruns are six times more likely on a contaminated runway.
There are other aspects too, aircraft technical failures have also contributed to several overruns. One manufacturer (with a type no longer in production), had a design issue that meant crews sometimes were not able to select reverse, and despite a “fix” overruns on that type continued to happen.
Regardless of the cause, runway overruns unfortunately keep occurring. Whilst significant advances have been made in aircraft technology, such as Runway Overrun Protection systems as fitted on many Airbus aircraft, many other aircraft are not as well equipped such as Business Jets/Corporate aircraft. Between 2017 and 2022 there were 6 of the 79 runway excursions in the corporate aviation category involved fatalities. In the same time frame in the commercial airline sector there were 117 excursions of which 8 were fatal. Given the much greater number of flying hours, the airline world flies in comparison to business aviation, this is significant.
As well as the avoidable loss of life in these accidents, the inevitable litigation that follows such events and the related aircraft losses has contributed to a reduction in the number of aviation insurance underwriters. This contraction of the insurance market has resulted in significant
insurance premium increases for most operators.
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