The Tacoma News Tribune reports: “A plane has slid off a runway at Sea-Tac Airport, Seattle’s KIRO-TV is reporting.” But when you go to KIRO’s site, it says: “A Boeing 747 freighter stopped too close to the end of a runway after landing at Sea-Tac Airport on Monday afternoon… The plane went beyond a painted line on the runway but did not go off the pavement.”

Christopher Frizzelle was The Stranger's print editor, and first joined the staff in 2003. He was the editor-in-chief from 2007 to 2016, and edited the story by Eli Sanders that won a 2012 Pulitzer...

2 replies on “Plane Slides Off the Runway at Sea-Tac—Or Does It?”

  1. The headline at KIRO says “skids off runway” but the SeaTac spox quoted in the story offers that the plane “traveled farther than its normal stopping point.”

  2. Yeah, welcome to semantics. The phrase “overshot the runway” makes people think a plane slid off the end of the hard-surface runway and careened into buildings, cars, schools full of children, or whatever.

    In actuality, airport runways for large aircraft have overrun areas at each end. These areas are marked off with stripes denoting that they are not to be used for landing. They are still load-bearing areas, but are not indended to be used as the touchdown zone.

    So an airplane that can not stop in time due to, say, slippery conditions, has “overshot the runway”. If a couple people then repeat it by saying the plane “slid off the runway”, well, people get all het up about it and think the worst.

Comments are closed.