Triple Slither

New York City seemed to be running out of runway last week.

First a Pan American Boeing 707-139 jet, coming into Kennedy Airport from Puerto Rico with 136 passengers and a crew of nine, overshot its runway and cracked apart in a sea of mud. No one was critically hurt. Then, about ten hours later, an American Airlines Lockheed Electra from Buffalo with 73 passengers and five crew members overshot a runway at La Guardia Air port and ended up in a pile of construction work. The only casualty was a construction worker who was hit by a flying stone. And less than two hours after that, an empty El Al Airlines Boeing 707-420, being ferried from Philadelphia by a five-man Israeli crew, skidded 200 ft. beyond the end of its 8,000-ft. runway at Kennedy and slushed to a stop hub-deep in soft sand.

"One aircraft overrunning a runway is very unusual," commented the Federal Aviation Agency's regional director, Oscar Bakke. "But three at once! I just don't recall anything like it." All of the three planes were making landings in rainy weather. The Pan Am flight, coming in on ILS guidance, apparently strayed from the glide path and came in high and too far down the runway. "Aquaplaning" -- a phenomenon in which a thin film of water can delay the point at which a plane's wheels touch the concrete of the run way -- is suspected to have been a contributing factor in last week's triple overshot.

Just to please coincidence collectors still further, the Federal Aviation Agency announced, in the middle of all the skidding, that next month it was prepared to discuss with leaders of the industry the installation of safety devices on runways to combat the hazards of overshooting.

Aircraft carriers have long arrested the speed of landing planes by means of cables engaging hooks on the underside of the planes' fuselages; and military airfields have used these extensively, as well as cable-and-nylon barriers at the ends of runways. New York's slithering seizure may speed up similar installations for civilians.

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