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'No margin for error' at Midway, expert says

A 6-year-old in a car was killed when a Boeing 737 slid off a runway Thursday at the Chicago airport.

By wire services
Published December 10, 2005

CHICAGO - A deadly accident in which a Boeing 737 slid off the end of a snowy runway brought renewed calls Friday for buffer zones or other safety measures to give pilots a wider margin for error.

In Thursday night's accident at Midway Airport, a Southwest Airlines jet making a landing plowed through a fence and into a street, killing a 6-year-old boy in a car. Ten other people, most of them on the ground, were injured.

The National Transportation Safety Board said the cause of the accident was still under investigation, and the plane's voice and data recorders were sent to Washington for analysis. But much of the attention focused on the 6,500-foot runway.

Like nearly 300 other U.S. commercial airports, Midway lacks 1,000-foot buffer zones at the ends of its runways. Midway was built in 1923 during the propeller era and has shorter runways than most major airports, with no room to extend them because it is hemmed in by houses and businesses.

Safety experts say such airports can guard against accidents by using beds of crushable concrete that can slow an aircraft if it slides off the end of a runway.

The concrete beds are in place at the end of 18 runways at 14 airports. They have stopped dangerous overruns three times since May 1999 at Kennedy Airport in New York.

"Certainly Midway airport officials should have already been trying to come up with something similar to this," said Jim Hall, NTSB chairman from 1993 to 2001. "There's really no margin for error at the end of that runway."

Hall said the lack of a 1,000-foot overrun area and the absence of a concrete bed would probably be a key focus of the investigation.

Though the airport had about 7 inches of snow, aviation officials said conditions at the time were acceptable. The plane did not appear to have any maintenance problems and had undergone a service check Wednesday in Phoenix, Southwest chief executive Gary Kelly said.

Southwest said the 59-year-old captain has been with the airline for more than 10 years, and the 35-year-old first officer who has flown with Southwest for 2 1/2 years. It was the first fatal crash in Southwest's 35-year history.

NTSB member Ellen Engleman Conners said air traffic controllers had rated the braking condition of the runway at the time of accident as "fair" for most of the pavement and "poor" at the end.

[Last modified December 10, 2005, 00:52:07]