Kerala havariet - Ville EMAS ha stoppet flyet? - Curt Lewis

Would EMAS have prevented the Kerala air tragedy?

Engineered materials arrestor system

• An Air India Express plane overshot the runway at Kozhikode airport & broke in two, killing 18 people.

The Kozhikode air crash was the second incident in India of an aircraft overshooting the runway on a tabletop airport. The first, in Mangalore in 2010, also involved an Air India Express plane and claimed over 150 lives. The kozhikode crash has once again opened up a debate, whether such airports should have an extra layer of safety mechanism to prevent such incidents.

A safety bed: Aircraft overshooting the runway isn't uncommon but as the Calicut airport accident shows it can have devastating consequences sometimes. To prevent such runway excursions, some of the world's major airports have a safety mechanism called arrestor beds to slow down or halt a plane if it overshoots the runway. Such arrestors are especially important for airports that cannot afford to have a long safety area beyond the runway either due to lack of space or due to the nature of the airport (table tops for instance).

The idea: The basic idea behind arrestors is that the "soft ground" that they create deforms easily under the weight of the aircraft that has overshot the runway. As the aircraft's tires crush the material it is made of, the drag slows it down. Aviation regulators have worked with the industry, have come up with engineered solutions for the design of these arrestors as well as the material that goes into them. Mathematical models have helped predict aircraft stopping distances which have been further validated by full-scale aircraft testing