Safety officials are investigating the reason why an American Airlines Boeing B737-800 aircraft suffered a braking malfunction on landing at Dallas Fort Worth Airport (DFW) on February 10, 2024.
Flight AA 1632 departed from Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport (DCA) at 17:07 local time. The two-hour, 40-minute flight was uneventful until the aircraft, with registration N991AN, landed at DFW Airport’s Runway 17L at approximately 21:45 local time.
There were no injuries reported among the 99 passengers and six crew members on board.
According to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the B737-800 aircraft “experienced a braking malfunction” and went into the Engineered Materials Arresting S ystem (EMAS) located at the end of the runway.
The EMAS is a bed of engineered materials built at the end of a runway to reduce the severity of a runway excursion.
Engineered materials are defined in FAA Advisory Circular No 150/5220-22B as “high energy absorbing materials of selected strength, which will reliably and predictably crush under the weight of an aircraft”, preventing runway overshoots.
The FAA said that to date there have been 21 incidents where EMAS s ystems have safely stopped 21 overrunning aircraft, with a combined total of 430 crew and passengers aboard those flights.