The underwear bomber’s abortive attempt to blow up a Northwest/Delta flight from Amsterdam to Detroit quickly overshadowed aviation’s other lucky break this past Christmas season–American Flight 331 from Miami to Kingston, Jamaica, which slid off a rain-soaked runway, breaking the fuselage in three places and injuring scores of people. Since no one died on American Flight 331–fortunately–and perhaps because the accident involved mostly foreigners in a foreign country, the 24/7 news cycle soon shifted to the failed Christmas Day terrorist bombing of the Northwest flight into the U.S. and the nonstop finger pointing of who was responsible for the security lapses that nearly allowed it to succeed.
While the mainstream media is otherwise distracted, those of us involved with aviation safety–as opposed to security–need to focus on why we haven’t done more to prevent the most preventable of accidents: runway overruns. No, we will never be able to prevent weather conditions conducive to hydroplaning or skidding off a runway; the wet runway and tailwind surely contributed to the American accident in Jamaica, much as slippery conditions and a tailwind surely contributed to Southwest’s runway overrun at Midway in December 2005. Nor will we ever be able fully to mitigate the effects of fatigue and other factors on pilot decision-making when it comes to landing in adverse weather conditions.
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