It’s a standard pilot nightmare: You touch down after a long but satisfying flight, and when you go to bring the airplane to a stop, the equipment fails you: brakes go soft, reversers don’t actuate, or beta mode won’t engage. While many factors can lead to an airplane running off the end of a runway during landing, it’s more likely that human error on the part of the flight crew causes an aircraft to overrun. Instead of simply making all runways longer or installing arresting devices or materials, we can examine these situations to inoculate ourselves periodically against these lapses.
An exploration of recent landing accidents among multiple classes of business jets—and a couple of instructive regional airline accidents—finds the hazards cut across the lines between single-pilot and multi-crew. Professionally piloted aircraft do not have any special protection from these events. It boils down to this: the failure to fully consider actual runway conditions and understand their knock-on effects, combined with fatigue and that siren-song desire to complete the mission.
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