Plane in Guyana Crash Slid off Runway

The Caribbean Airlines jetliner that broke apart Saturday after landing and sliding off a slick Guyana runway, without any fatalities, represents the type of accident international air-safety experts have been working the hardest to prevent in recent years.
Arriving in Georgetown, Guyana's capital, before dawn in rainy conditions with 163 people onboard, the Boeing 737 rolled off the end of the tarmac and crashed through a fence. The fuselage broke into two pieces in front of the wings, as the tip of the nose dug into the ground and the plane came to rest short of a deep jungle ravine.
The flight originated from New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport and made a stop in Port of Spain, Trinidad. Preliminary reports indicated dozens of people required hospital care, with at least four suffering serious injuries. According to various early media reports from the scene, passengers recounted screams and the smell of fuel in the cabin before they rushed to slide down emergency slides.
The Associated Press quoted one passenger saying rescue crews were slow to appear, and a taxi driver charged $20 to drive her to the terminal.
The Boeing 737-800 accident comes after an encouraging six-month period, according to safety experts, marked by year-over-year improvement in the global rate of major accidents involving modern Western-built passenger aircraft. From the beginning of January to the end of June this year, there wasn't a single fatal accident involving such Western planes operating scheduled passenger service. During the same period, at least five airliners in this category were involved in significant, but non-fatal, runway accidents
In recent years, regulators and safety groups have focused particularly on preventing runway accidents in which poor pilot decision-making results in landing aircraft being unable to stop safely.
But the latest crash highlights persistent problems and hazards poised by so-called runway excursions: accidents and serious incidents stemming from airliners careening off runways, often as a result of pilots who landed too fast, touched too far down the strip or failed to recognize the difficulty of stopping on wet, slushy or snow-packed surfaces.
Some safety experts, including Gunther Matschnigg, the top safety official of the International Air Transport Association, have said such runway issues may account for as much as 45% of the overall safety risks facing the global industry.
According to Western-built aircraft statistics compiled by manufacturer Boeing Co., all categories of runway accidents, including runway excursions during takeoffs and landings, accounted for more than 970 fatalities between 2001 and 2010.
A report released last year by European air-traffic control officials cited runway excursions as "the most common type of accident reported annually" in the region and around the world, with landing overruns accounting for some 75% of the total.
The National Transportation Safety Board will assist Guyana in the investigation. The airline released a statement indicating it dispatched a team of executives and technical staff "to offer full support to the injured," but didn't provide details about the event.
In the U.S., a number of previous runway overruns during landings prompted significant safety analyses and flight-safety changes. These highly-publicized accidents included a Southwest Airlines Co. jet that ran off the end of a slushy Chicago strip in December 2005. Four years later, an American Airlines Boeing 737-800 equipped with enhanced visual-landing aids nevertheless hurtled off the end of a Kingston, Jamaica runway made slick by standing water. Nobody aboard either plane was killed.
Still, these earlier crashes prompted industry officials and regulators to rethink safety margins for big jets landing on contaminated runways.
For years, international safety groups such as the Flight Safety Foundation of Alexandria, Va., a nonprofit safety advocacy organization, and IATA, the largest global industry group representing carriers, have distributed training materials and urged airlines to warn pilots about the dangers of approaching runways with excessive speeds or steep descents. Such approaches are the most common cause of dangerous overruns.
But the Guyana accident, according to preliminary reports, also could involve other factors. Pictures of the scene suggest that movable panels on the front of the Boeing 737's wings, and perhaps also near their rear edges, weren't extended as required. The devices are designed to help planes decelerate and reduce speed at touchdown.
Safety experts said that without the benefit of the movable wing panels, it could have been difficult for the pilots to stop the plane in time.
It's too early to draw conclusions, but U.S. safety experts on Saturday focused much of their attention on the configuration of the wings, the cockpit crew's actions and possible mechanical or other problems.
Investigators will examine if there were any problems with the plane's hydraulics, brakes or other systems, and whether that possibly could have contributed to the accident.