ACRP Report 3: Analysis of Aircraft Overruns and Undershoots for Runway Safety Areas
covers four areas: (1) Research collected on accident/incident data from several notable
sources; (2) inventory of the conditions relating to each; (3) assessment of risk in relation
to the runway safety area; and (4) discussion on a set of alternatives to the traditional runway
safety area.
Overruns and undershoots are factors in the design or improvement of runway safety
areas (RSAs). The traditional approach to mitigate risk associated with accidents or incidents
is to enlarge the runway safety area, but many airports do not have sufficient land
to accommodate standard Federal Aviation Administration or International Civil Aviation
Organization recommendations for RSAs. Airports that pursue this approach face
extremely expensive and controversial land acquisition or wetlands filling projects to make
sufficient land available.
This report uses a probabilistic approach—a quantitative assessment—to analyze the
RSA and begins a discussion on how alternatives to a standard 1,000-foot RSA may adequately
mitigate risk. The report also assesses the factors that increase the risk of such accidents
occurring, helps with understanding how these incidents may happen, and suggests
that aircraft overrun and undershoot risks are related to specific operational factors.
The report suggests that significant improvement to airport operations safety may be
achieved by monitoring and managing these operational factors for both RSA planning and
during actual aircraft operations, and it provides recommendations for collection and
reporting of data in future accident and incident investigations and reporting to allow future
improvements to these models
