Miami —
When the Amazon Air cargo plane barreled off the runway at Miami International Airport this week going nearly 130 miles an hour, there was little to slow it down. The 156-foot-wide jet crushed vehicles, smashed concrete road barriers and tore through navigational equipment. Five people in vehicles were killed.
A concrete system designed to decelerate planes when they can’t stop at the end of the runway has been installed at some US airports — but not in Miami.
It’s called EMAS — which stands for engineered materials arresting system — and it is designed to bring an aircraft going about 80 miles an hour to a stop in just feet. It’s not clear it would have entirely stopped the plane in Miami, since the aircraft was going much faster, but it certainly would have kept the plane from going so far off the runway.
It’s a system being praised for saving as many as 250 lives in the last decade.
