[teleforce]

To continue your idiom, it's not a red herring, it's the elephant in the room.

Seriously, I think the incident it's a hard lesson for airport designer and ICAO. For better civil aviation safety, the next airport runway should have ample room for safer aircraft landing without landing gears. Previously there's no real-time aircraft tracking requirement for passenger aircraft only for cargo, but after MH370 it's mandatory now and even ICAO acknowledged this very reason for the new regulations introduction.

[reisse]

No amount of ample room will help if the plane touches down overshooting more than half of the runway.

Furthermore (this is pure speculation at the moment) I think chances are the crew were kind of cosplaying PIA PK-8303 - forgot about landing gears in a stress from bird strike, attempted go-around after realising it, but had not enough power from engines due to bird strike or ground hit. It's plausible final investigation report will conclude absence of localizer antennas wouldn't save them.

[dredmorbius]

History says otherwise.

Most runway overruns occur with no or few fatalities:

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42606790>

[nhinck3]

I looked into all of those and of the ones that had speeds available, they were half or less than half the speed at the time of overrun

[blueflow]

Yes, because the speed was lower. Kinetic energy increases with speed squared. Uncontrolled 300 km/h on the ground kills you in any vehicle.

[dredmorbius]

That's a fair argument, and I've noted the kinetic energy aspect elsewhere in this discussion.

That said, based on my observations of the terrain past the runway / airport threshold, it seems to me that absent the Muan Murder Wall, survivability would have been far higher in this case. See: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42607464>

I've yet to find a source that does a better job of organising incidents by landing speed / profile in a way which might better provide for more direct comparisons.

[gora_mohanty]

People keep saying "half the runway", "more than half the runway" in this thread. The linked article has a large graphic saying the plane touched down about a third of the way down the runway.

[mda]

So survival chance of hitting a concrete wall and open field would be same?

I don't think so.

[SR2Z]

Very, very few airport runways are long enough for a plane without brakes to land halfway and be fine.

It's simply not possible to build airports in useful places and guarantee three-mile runways.

[teleforce]

Apparently runaway excursions is the third cause of major accidents of large commercial transport aircraft [1].

Muan airport runway distance is one the shortest in Korea, less than 3 km and ironically during the incident reportedly there is an ongoing construction to increase the length of the runaway to more than 3 km, but effectively further shorten the runaway to 2.5 km (similar to Yangyang Airport). Strangely South Korea has many shorter runway international airports.

Most of the modern international airport have more than 4 km runway, and new major airports for example Qatar Doha, US Denver and SA Upington has runaway length close to 5 km.

[1] Operational Landing Distances: A new standard for in-flight landing distance assessment.

[2] Muan Airport runway previously shortened, impact under scrutiny:

https://m.koreatimes.co.kr/pages/article.asp?newsIdx=389538

[FabHK]

> new major airports for example Qatar Doha, US Denver and SA Upington has runaway length close to 5 km.

These are by no means average "new major airports".

Denver airport (from 1989) is the west's largest airport (by land area), and at 5000 ft+ elevation (necessitating longer runways).

Upington in the far North-West of South Africa was built in 1968 to accommodate a full Boeing 747 flying to Europe non-stop during the apartheid regime when sanctions meant that overflight or stops in the rest of Africa were not feasible. It has one of the longest runways in the world due to the use case and hot & high environment at 2800 ft (and was intended as an emergency runway for Space Shuttles, if memory serves correctly). It is hardly used anymore with less than 20 aircraft movements a day.

There is no recent trend for longer runways. The issue is extremely well known and well understood, by and large.

[usr1106]

Denver needs a longer runway because of its altitude. Doha because of the temperatures. It makes no sense to compare their length with locations at more favorable locations.

[dredmorbius]

You don't need the aircraft to survive.

You need the passengers to survive.

And that's eminently possible, even where the hull itself is destroyed (several cases of fuselages splitting in two or three with no or minimal fatalities):

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42606790>

[bagels]

The choice of keeping the craft intact is much more likely likely to lead to a safer outcome, isn't it?

[dredmorbius]

It's a vastly more challenging goal, with higher engineering, financial, and land-use requirements.

Passenger survivial: Decelleration g-forces kept within a given threshold, evacuation slides operable, passengers cleared within 90 seconds. Hull is sacrificed.

Airframe survival: No significant damage to aircraft structure or systems.

Humans in this case are substantially more robust than aircraft.

You'll find a similar situation in, e.g., earthquake safety construction. The goal isn't for structural reuse, but for inhabitant survivability. Structures may be renovated in some case but are generally demolished and replaced. They did their job in saving lives.

Steel-reinforced concrete buildings can still sustain considerable damage, possibly to the point that they will be unusable after the quake. This has to do with the way governments set building codes, which tell engineers how to design a building to withstand a certain level of earthquake shaking. Codes, including those in the U.S. and Turkey, generally require that a building achieves what is called “life safety” under a given maximum expected earthquake in an area. “Our seismic codes are only a minimum requirement,” says Sissy Nikolaou, research earthquake engineer at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. “You just want these buildings at least to give you the chance to get out of it alive when the big one happens, under the assumption that they may be seriously damaged.” The situation is akin to a car that crumples in a crash: the vehicle absorbs the impact to protect passengers, but it is totaled.

<https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-to-engineer-b...>

The automobile-safety example given above is also apt. A car can be destroyed in a crash, what's key is that its occupants survive.

[bagels]

When the wings come off, you get a pretty big fire though. Obviously they cannot be made infinitely strong, but I'd rather be in the plane that isn't disintegrating and in fire.

[dredmorbius]

Armouring wings against fuel-system penetration (tanks, hoses, valves, etc.) in a mishap is an absolutely insane level of engineering, and all but certainly infeasible.

The much more reasonable alternative is to have 1) fuel-dumping systems which rid the craft of excess fuel prior to an emergency landing (another reason, BTW, to remain aloft as long as possible after an emergency has been declared), and 2) to have the means to evacuate the aircraft quickly. Modern standard is 90 seconds, with only half the exits in use. Initial fireballs, whilst impressive, usually occur largely above the aircraft and direct heat upwards. It's the subsequent ground- and cabin-based fires which are most lethal, and those tend not to develop for about two minutes.

<https://simpleflying.com/aircraft-90-second-evacuation/>

After that, you want the actual fuselage and passenger restraint systems (seats, seat belts) to provide maximum protection against injury in the crash itself. They largely do this. At least when aircraft aren't encountering Muan Murder Walls at speeds well in excess of 100 kt and disintegrating fully.