Airline Operations and the Contaminated Runway

AN OVERRUN ACCIDENT WELL-KNOWN to the aviation industry happened at Boston's Logan Airport on January 23, 1982. A DC-10 landed on a runway contaminated by hard-packed snow and glazed ice overlaid with rainwater and went off the runway end at 49 knots.

Could that airplane have stopped on the runway? Nobody knows the answer. Logan Airport had no means of establishing, with reasonable accuracy, how slippery that runway was on that evening.

Furthermore, would it have made any difference if friction measurements had been made with state-of-the-art equipment and the results made available?

This paper seeks to highlight some well-known problems and suggest ways and means to reduce risk on the contaminated runway.