The airport safety system that could have slowed the plane that left the runway in Miami, killing 5 people

By Pete Muntean, CNN

Miami (CNN) — When the Amazon Air cargo plane barreled off the runway at Miami International Airport this week going nearly 130 miles an hour, there was little to slow it down. The 156-foot-wide jet crushed vehicles, smashed concrete road barriers and tore through navigational equipment. Five people in vehicles were killed.

A concrete system designed to decelerate planes when they can’t stop at the end of the runway has been installed at some US airports — but not in Miami.

It’s called EMAS — which stands for engineered materials arresting system — and it is designed to bring an aircraft going about 80 miles an hour to a stop in just feet. It’s not clear it would have entirely stopped the plane in Miami, since the aircraft was going much faster, but it certainly would have kept the plane from going so far off the runway.

It’s a system being praised for saving as many as 250 lives in the last decade.

A rainy night in Roanoke

Steve Harrison was sitting next to his wife, Deborah Tatar, looking out the window of United Express Flight 4339 when he realized this landing wasn’t going to be normal.

The approach on September, 24 2025 into Virginia’s Roanoke-Blacksburg Regional Airport took the flight through a rainstorm, according to federal investigators. But what bothered Harrison most was that the plane sailed past the point where it would normally touch down.

“I thought, ‘This better stop pretty soon,’” he told CNN.

Seconds later, the Embraer 145 regional jet heaved into a bed of lightweight, crushable cement, bringing the 20-ton jet to a sudden stop just shy of an embankment that drops toward four lanes of a busy road.

Harrison and his wife walked away uninjured.

They, along with 48 other passengers on board, were saved by EMAS. Deployed at 70 airports across the United States, the system has halted potentially deadly runway overruns 26 times. On September 3, 2025, the system scored two saves less than five hours apart.

“It’s like a runaway truck stop, but for airplanes,” said Nick Subbotin, the acting head of the team overseeing EMAS for the Federal Aviation Administration. Inside a hangar next to Atlantic City International Airport where the FAA initially tested EMAS by intentionally speeding a Boeing 727 into it, Subbotin has spread out a series of photographs detailing each incident where he says the material saved lives.

EMAS looks deceptively simple. Installed beyond the end of a runway, it is made from lightweight cellular cement engineered to collapse under the concentrated weight of an airplane’s landing gear. As the wheels break through the surface and sink into the material, the resistance rapidly slows the airplane.

The beds can contain hundreds of blocks laid out in a grid, growing progressively deeper so an aircraft slows without subjecting the landing gear — or the people aboard — to extreme deceleration forces that can be deadly in a crash.

“Lots of testing went into mathematical models of determining the material and how it crushes,” Subbotin said. Given aircraft with a certain weight, size and energy as it leaves the runway, this type of material will safely decelerate that aircraft coming to a stop, saving the airplane and saving lives.

EMAS is typically installed where geography or development makes it impossible for an airport to provide the full runway safety area normally required beyond the pavement. At some airports, the obstacle beyond the runway is a highway. At others, it is a hillside, water or homes. In Roanoke, it’s four lanes of traffic.

“If the available real estate is not there, EMAS becomes an alternative for the airport to safely stop aircraft in the event of an overrun,” Subbotin said.

Addressing one of aviation’s largest risks

Runway excursions remain one of aviation’s most prevalent accident risks.

A industry study by the Flight Safety Foundation found from 2005 through the first half of 2019, runway excursions accounted for 23 percent of accidents chronicled in an international crash database, more than any other accident type.

The report said the industry had reduced the rate of commercial aviation runway excursion accidents, but their absolute number and severity still represented a significant risk.

EMAS cannot prevent a pilot failing to abort a flawed descent to landing — a top training target for major airlines.

In Roanoke, the EMAS bed became the last layer of protection after a landing the National Transportation Safety Board says had already gone wrong.

According to the NTSB’s preliminary report, Flight 4339 was too high as it approached the runway. The first officer twice told the captain to abort the landing, investigators said.

“There were probably other things that should have happened differently before we got to that point,” Tatar told CNN. “All we know is that that was the last point.”

“And that’s what saved us,” Harrison added.

The NTSB investigation remains ongoing.

Safety experts stress that EMAS is not a substitute for preventing runway excursions in the first place. The Flight Safety Foundation calls for layers of protection, including better training for pilots about when to abort flawed approaches to land.

But when those layers fail, EMAS is there to mitigate the consequences.

Installing more EMAS

The recent string of saves comes as Boston Logan International Airport is making a major investment in the same technology.

Starting August 31, Logan closed Runway 9/27 for approximately 75 days as crews undertake the next phase of a multimillion-dollar runway safety project.

Part of that work involves installing more EMAS protection at the end of a runway extending toward Boston Harbor.

The project underscores the unusual tradeoff involved in building a system designed for an emergency that may never happen.

For roughly two and a half months, Logan will lose the use of an entire runway. Airport officials have warned the closure will reduce capacity under some configurations and could lead to flight delays and traffic-management measures.

Massport, which operates the airport, calls the work a critical safety upgrade, but Boston highlights why EMAS was developed in the first place.

Logan is hemmed in by water and dense urban development. At airports where extending a conventional runway safety area would mean filling in water, moving a road or acquiring developed land, EMAS can provide stopping distance within a much smaller footprint.

For Tatar, Boston’s investment carries a significance that goes well beyond construction schedules and flight delays.

As a teenager, she lost a friend aboard a commercial flight that crashed into a seawall at Boston Logan International Airport.

Only weeks after Tatar and Harrison walked away from the Roanoke overrun, their first grandson was born.

“We would not have seen him born,” Tatar said. “There’s a very good chance that we would not have survived.”

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