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by teleforce
530 days ago
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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 |
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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.