Civil Aviation Authority Sri Lanka remains with its head in the sand

It is inevitable, based on the law of averages, that aircraft will overrun on landing. While we wait for the USA’s National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) to present a detailed report on the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of the Miami accident, Sri Lankan aviation authorities should take immediate steps, as an urgent safety measure, to remove the ‘offending’ wall (at Ratmalana) and replace it with a frangible (i.e. breaking on impact) fence.

On Sunday, 6th September 2026, a Boeing 767 300 of 21 Air, an all-cargo airline on contract to Amazon Prime, overran the active runway at Miami International airport in Florida, killing five passengers and injuring five more in two vehicles travelling on two perimeter roads.

Historically, the aviation industry averages approximately 30 runway excursion (overrun) accidents per year, globally, as referenced in safety records.

In response to concerns expressed by this writer and others in the wake of the fatal overrun by a Jeju Air Boeing 737-800 at Muan International Airport ,in South Korea, on 29th December 2024, Civil Aviation Authority-Sri Lanka (CAASL) did a study on the risk probability with respect to the concrete wall at the Galle Road end of the runway at Colombo International Airport, Ratmalana (CIAR). They declared that it was improbable that a landing aircraft would overrun (i.e. exit the end of the runway) and collide with the wall. In reporting thus, CAASL falsely justified to the President and Aviation Minister that this hazardous wall could be kept and need not be replaced by a fence, as demanded by Annex 14 to the ICAO Convention of 1944.

This ‘Seeya’ has been insisting that ‘anything that can go wrong, will go wrong’ (Murphy’s Law), and sure enough, an accident of that type happened again in Miami.

So as suggested by me, the ‘risk probability’ in the Risk Analysis Matrix (above) must now be shifted from ‘Improbable’ to ‘Remote’, thus putting the ‘Risk Impact/ Severity’ in the red (2A to 3A).

It is inevitable, based on the law of averages, that aircraft will overrun on landing. While we wait for the USA’s National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) to present a detailed report on the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of the Miami accident, Sri Lankan aviation authorities should take immediate steps, as an urgent safety measure, to remove the ‘offending’ wall and replace it with a frangible (i.e. breaking on impact) fence.

It may be argued that because the 21 Air (Amazon) Boeing 767 crashed into the fence, five innocent lives were lost, while another five persons on the ground were hospitalized with severe injuries, the presence of a wall would have prevented that. Remember that if it was a passenger aircraft and not a cargo aircraft, as in Muan, South Korea, this latest accident would have been ‘catastrophic’ (i.e. exploding on impact) with more lives lost. Most airports in the world have roads on the perimeter but they do not have concrete walls.