Citing high operational and maintenance cost, the Airports Authority of India (AAI) and the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) had not acted upon a 10-year-old proposal for using Engineered Materials Arresting System (EMAS) technology to ensure the safety of tabletop runway at the Calicut international airport.
The ₹100-crore proposal, sources said, was rejected on various grounds, including the recommendation to bring experts from abroad after a runway overshoot. It also recommended the closure of the runway for several days in the event of an accident.
Ministry’s report
Incidentally, based of the Court of Inquiry Report on the Mangaluru airport crash, the Ministry of Civil Aviation had recommended in May 2012 to the DGCA to provide suitably designed aircraft decelerating systems like EMAS at both these airports with tabletop runways. “Runways in airports such as Mangaluru and Calicut are very critical and providing suitably designed aircraft decelerating systems like EMAS will ensure safety,” it said. EMAS is made of engineered lightweight materials and when used at runway ends, acts as a safety barrier and stops an aircraft overrun.
However, at that time, the AAI was expanding the Runway End Safety Areas (RESA) at the Calicut airport so as to reduce the damage when an aircraft overran the end of a runway during a landing or after a rejected takeoff or undershoot. In fact, the RESA was expanded from 90 metres to 240 metres after reducing the runway of the Calicut Airport from 2,850 metres to 2,700 metres.
Reasons cited
EMAS technology, which aims at reducing the severity of the consequences of a runway excursion, is accepted internationally and installed in over 100 airports, including Tibet. The AAI had been toying with the idea of EMAS as early as 2008. However, the idea had to be dropped following the severe global financial crisis. In September 2010, two EMAS models were proposed for the Calicut airport for narrow and widebodied aircraft as land acquisition was hindering the expansion of the airport runway.
After the accidents at Mangaluru in May 2010 and Lengpui (Mizoram) in May 2011, the AAI went ahead with the project to install it at the Calicut airport. But the proposal was caught in a bureaucratic maze with the DGCA also opposing the project.
A standard EMAS installation can stop an aircraft from overrunning the runway at approximately 80 miles per hour and even if the RESA is less than standard length, according to the Federation Aviation Administration of the United States Department of Transportation.