Plane Crash Kills 158, Raises Questions About Runway Safety in India and Beyond

On Saturday, an Air India plane overshot the runway at the airport in Mangalore, a city in the southern Indian state of Karnataka, and crashed into a ravine. The plane exploded into flames and 158 people were killed. Eight survived, although one of the survivors, a toddler, died en route to the hospital.

The crash raises troubling questions about runway safety in India, and in much of the developing world, where there has been a race to build new airports in remote locations and second and third-tier cities that were once served only by decrepit roads or slow-moving trains. Now it may be time to rethink the development strategy of using air transport to literally   “leapfrog” over the need to modernize ground travel infrastructure. This is particularly true when terrain makes it difficult to build an airport that meets modern safety standards for commercial flights.

The airport in Mangalore is not a new one. It opened in 1951. But the runway where Saturday’s crash occurred was constructed starting in 2004 and became operational in 2006.  Indian officials and airport authorities have claimed that airport met the standards of the International Commercial Aviation Organization (ICAO). But the runway in question does not seem to have complied with all the latest ICAO recommendations on runway safety. Among its problems, according to press reports: the recommended touchdown point on the runway is further down the tarmac than the ICAO recommends. In addition, the airport is not equipped with approach radar that can tell controllers whether an aircraft is on the correct glide path for landing.

The runway is also only 200 meters wide, instead of the 300 meters that the ICAO recommends, according to a Mangalore citizens group that had filed a lawsuit to stop construction of the new runway. That may have been a factor because from the accounts of the few survivors, the aircraft may have suffered a burst tire during braking and then veered off the side of the runway, striking a radio tower used for the airport’s instrument landing system, before plummeting off a cliff into an adjacent ravine. (Mangalore is a “tabletop” airport, meaning that it is built on a plateau atop a hill, with steep drops into valleys on all sides. Pilots report that this has always made landing at the airport somewhat more difficult than bringing in a plane on a runway built on a flat plain.)

The Mangalore runway where Saturday’s crash occurred does have a  Runway End Safety Area, or Resa — an area designed to give an airplane extra room to slow down in case it overshoots the runway. But this runway’s Resa was less than 100 meters long, instead of the 240 meters that the ICAO recommends (and the International Federation of Airline Pilot Associations recommends an even longer Resa of at least 300 meters, a standard that the United States and Austria have incorporated into their runway safety guidelines.) Whether that was a factor in this crash is yet to be determined (and it may not have mattered, since the evidence so far is that the plan careened off the side of the runway rather than shooting straight past the end of it.)

The International Air Transport Association (IATA) recommends that if a Resa is less than 240 meters, the runway should be equipped with a “runway arrestor system” that is designed to safely stop an overrunning commercial airliner. Such arrestor systems include various kinds of sand pits, energy-absorbing barriers and something called an engineered materials arresting system (or EMAS) that consists of cellular cement blocks placed at the end of a runway that are designed to slow an airplane and then collapse predictably under the aircraft’s weight to stop its forward motion — provided the plane is traveling at less than 70 knots when it hits the system. (One key advantage over sand pits is that the material is still strong enough for emergency vehicles and firetrucks to drive over it, allowing them quick access to the airplane.) The runway at Mangalore had a sand pit, according to some reports, but it apparently failed to stop the plane. The airport does not have an EMAS.

And Mangalore is hardly unique in failing to meet the latest international safety guidance. Many airports throughout the world don’t meet these standards. This is particularly true in countries like India, where air travel has been looked at as a way to short cut the process of improving ground transportation links. While India’s many airline companies have tended to be money losers, much like airlines elsewhere, air transportation has been an important ingredient in India’s rapid economic development. It has allowed places that were once many days journey by rail or road to be connected to major cities – and the rest of the world — in just a few hours time. This has facilitated the movement of both people and goods, which might otherwise be dependent on the country’s poor ground transportation infrastructure.

In Mangalore, there was a lot of political pressure to establish a second runway at the airport that could handle international flights because it would help connect the region with the Persian Gulf, where many people from this part of Karnataka found work. (The flight that crashed was in fact coming back from Dubai, full of these migrant workers and their families.) The remittances these workers send home is an important boon to the local economy. But in the race to construct a second landing strip, was enough attention paid to safety?

There are several other airports in India which have been identified as problematic by the press in recent days: Kozhikode International Airport in Kerala, which has a tabletop configuration similar to Mangalore’s; the short runway at Patna in Bihar, which is surrounded by residential areas; the Jaipur airport which also fails to conform to ICAO norms and has only a provisional license from the international body; Chandigarh’s and Ahmedabad’s airports also have safety concerns. So too does Nagpur. And most smaller airports in India, like Mangalore, lack approach radars.

The statistics for runway safety in the developing world are not promising. So-called “runway excursions” where a plane either overshoots the runway on landing or during an aborted takeoff, accounted for about a third of the commercial aircraft incidents between 2005 and 2009, according to the statistics from IATA. (I’ll link here to a presentation by the assistant director of safety, operations and infrastructure for the IATA that includes not only some interesting stats, but some great photos of runways that certainly don’t look like they conform to international safety standards for commercial flights.)  Of the 161 runway excursions logged during this period, 19 resulted in fatalities, killing close to 500 people. And the vast majority of runway excursions — about 75 percent — took place in the developing world. Southern Asia was especially prone to the problem, with the region accounting for a third of all such accidents. Meanwhile, Africa and the Middle East, had the worst record in terms of the ratio of runway excursions per million landings (3.85 in Sub-Saharan Africa and 3.16 in the Middle East and North Africa.) Southern Asia and Latin America were not much better with ratios of 1.3 and 1.29 respectively. This compares with ratios of 0.34 in North America and 0.39 in Europe.

There may be many reasons why the rate of such accidents is much higher in the developing world. But my guess is that one of them is that in these areas, airports are increasingly being built in areas where the natural terrain simply does not allow for an airport that meets the best modern safety standards for commercial aircraft to be constructed. In many cases, it might make far more sense to improve the rail and road links that connect these remote regions and second and third tier cities to airports that are built to international standard  — and reduce the dependency on air travel for commerce and tourism. Allowing commercial flights to use sub-standard runways just so a city or region can “leap frog” poor ground transport infrastructure is a recipe for disaster.