Crushable wall that slowed Pence plane developed at UD

All 48 people aboard Indiana Gov. Mike Pence’s plane stepped off safely Thursday night after a near-disaster when the plane slid off the rain-soaked runway.

The plane carrying Pence, the Republican vice presidential candidate, needed all 7,000 feet of runway and then some to finally stop at New York’s LaGuardia Airport. Pence talked about the scraping stop after a hard landing at New York’s LaGuardia Airport on “CBS This Morning” today on Channel 7.

“Once we were on the ground, you could tell they were trying to brake, stop the aircraft as quickly as possible … it slid back and forth a little bit,” he said.

Following the incident, experts with the port authority in New York said the Boeing 737’s runway overshoot could have been much more damaging without a product developed in large part to work at the University of Dayton Research Institute, called “engineered material arresting system.”

“Installations at the end of runways to do exactly the purpose that they service tonight: which is to slow down an aircraft that is approaching the end of the runway,” Patrick Foye, executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

Think of the product like Styrofoam in packing material, but concrete instead of plastic, said Geoff Frank, a senior researcher at UDRI who worked helped to develop EMAS. He said it’s rigid enough to resist weather conditions and winds from jet engines, and you can walk on it. But an overrunning plane sinks right in.

“It’s kind of like running through a thick layer of foam. So, it really puts a lot of drag on the wheels. And that causes the airplane to stop rapidly in the short distance before it runs into the body of water or a road or whatever’s the obstacle at the end of the runway,” Frank said.

The FAA requires them as a safety feature at airports like LaGuardia with bodies of water or highways too close to runways. Foye said it assisted in developing the technology long with UD and the Engineered Arresting Systems Corp. in New Jersey. Data shows EMAS systems are in place at 61 airports across the U.S., though Dayton International is not among them.

“It’s very gratifying to know that we were able to maybe save lives and maybe prevent injuries and especially somebody as important as a potential VP,” Frank said.

Before Thursday night, the most recent data available showed EMAS systems safely stopped 10 overrunning aircraft with a total of 245 passengers and crew aboard those flights.

The Pence campaign plane incident was under investigation.