A review of civil aircraft arresting system for runway overruns

An airplane may run out of runway length because of high landing speed, late touchdown and loss of control in wheel alignment during takeoff or landing, leading to catastrophic damage and heavy losses of lives. To reduce the runway safety risk has remained a top priority for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in recent decades. In order to prevent the disasters, an innovative civil aircraft arresting system called Engineered Material Arresting System (EMAS) has been installed at the terminal of Runway Safety Areas (RSA) in the main international airports around the world. EMAS has already succeeded in keeping the airplanes on the runway and it has proved to be an effective technique to mitigate overruns that take place. This paper provides a systematic overview of the recent research efforts and advancements about the civil aircraft arresting system, with a focus on the concept introduction, structural construction, standard EMAS, installation and maintenance of EMAS. Furthermore, the major research approaches for the civil aircraft arresting system, such as the representative theoretical models, numerical simulations and full-scale aircraft arresting experiments, are highlighted and discussed to clarify the energy absorption mechanism of the aircraft arresting system. The current operational performance of the aircraft arresting systems and successful arresting cases for the airplanes that overshot the runway are described in this paper. The main shortcomings of the current aircraft arresting systems are pointed out based on the investigation of the current service condition for the EMAS, and then some novel arresting systems promising to replace the current core material for EMAS are listed.