EVENT SUMMARY Southwest Airlines Flight 1248 from Baltimore's Thurgood Marshall Airport to Chicago's Midway International Airport was a scheduled passenger flight. On December 8, 2005, the Boeing 737-700 carrying 98 passengers and 5 crew members on board crashed while landing in a heavy snowstorm in Chicago. The plane went off the runway and crashed into a car in the nearby street, killing a 5-year-old boy and injuring 4 people on the ground and 18 passengers on board. WEATHER CONDITIONSThe snowstorm hit northeastern Illinois covering up to 10 inches in parts of the Chicago metropolitan area. Visibility at the airport was observed to be occasionally reduced to 0.2 km, partly due to large snowflakes. Pilots were advised to enter standby mode while runway clearing operations were underway. METAR reported 110 degree winds at 11 knots, visibility ½ land mile, cloud ceiling 400 feet, and runway 31C RVR 4500 feet (Wilson, n.d.). The aircraft's design allows for a safe landing with up to 10 knots of tailwind component. This was further limited by Southwest's corporate policies and flight operations manual allowing pilots with no more than 5 knots of tailwind to land. From the data it can be seen that at the time of the accident, tailwinds were between 8 knots. OBSERVATIONS The aircraft landed at 2000 feet on the runway and it is believed that the pilot did not activate the thrust reversers until 18 seconds after landing, which was too late and at that point, the aircraft was only 1000 feet from the end of the runway and was likely to crash into the fence. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) reports showed that the Southwest Airlines plane had… half the paper… as an Engineered Material Arrest System (EMAS). This system requires much less space and offers the same level of benefits as RESA. There are numerous cases where EMAS decelerated the aircraft and helped it avoid the potential accident. To better understand the use of EMAS, below is a list of some other incidents where EMAS has safely stopped speeding planes: > July 2006, a Mystere Falcon 900 overran the runway at Greenville Downtown Airport in South Carolina > July 2008, an Airbus A320 overruns the runway at ORD > January 2010, a Bombardier CRJ-200 regional jet overruns the runway at Yeager Airport in Charleston, WVA > October 2013, a Cessna 680 Citation invaded the runway at Palm Beach International in West Palm Beach, FL- EMAS is under construction at Trenton-Mercer Airport - September 2012 - Photo Credits - Trenton Times