ACI World has published runway overrun guidance telling airport leaders that a runway end can meet minimum regulatory dimensions and still carry significant unmanaged risk, and that the absence of a past accident “does not by itself demonstrate that the risk is adequately controlled.”
ACI World has published guidance telling airport leaders that a runway end can meet minimum regulatory dimensions and still carry significant unmanaged risk. The advisory bulletin, dated 10 September 2026, covers runway end safety areas (RESAs) and engineered materials arresting systems (EMAS), the two main forms of protection against aircraft that overrun or undershoot a runway, and sets out what a board should demand before signing off further spend on either.
Runway excursions sit on ICAO’s list of high-risk occurrence categories, and ACI World is explicit that prevention comes first, with end-of-runway protection as the last layer of defence when it fails. Airports building emergency response capability around that last layer can compare it with Sharjah Airport Authority’s crisis-response training with police. The guidance does not ask airport executives to size a RESA or specify arresting material themselves. It asks them to be satisfied that the underlying technical assessment is credible and that the response is proportionate to the risk actually present.
That assessment, ACI World says, has to answer five questions: what can happen at that runway end, what the consequences would be given what lies beyond it, what practicable options exist to reduce the risk, what residual risk remains after any investment, and what the operational and financial implications are. Terrain, roads, water, embankments and nearby development all count as consequence factors even where an airport has technically satisfied its regulator’s minimum RESA distance.
Where conventional RESA extension is not possible because of land constraints, ICAO recognises arresting systems as an alternative, subject to state acceptance. EMAS technology, which uses material designed to collapse and decelerate an aircraft without any external activation, was developed in the US and is supplied commercially by Runway Safe, the Swedish manufacturer that grew out of that original programme. ACI World is careful to say EMAS is not automatically the right answer everywhere: suitability depends on the specific fleet, terrain and realistic alternatives at that airport, not on an incident elsewhere.
The guidance leans hard on the airport’s own safety management system and its local runway safety team, which brings together the airport operator, aircraft operators and air traffic services to share hazard information. It stops short, deliberately, of letting that team replace the airport’s formal engineering, investment and governance process. The same logic runs through Sharjah Airport Authority’s recent crisis-response training with police, where cross-agency coordination sits alongside, not instead of, the airport’s own procedures.
ACI World’s framing also lands close behind the AirportNEXT study from ACI-NA, which had 320 airport executives ranking risk and resilience trends this year. On the surveillance side, the FAA’s rollout of surface surveillance systems to 44 more US airports by the end of 2026 addresses a related but separate risk: what happens on the runway, rather than what happens if an aircraft leaves it.
The guidance carries no compliance deadline and no attached cost; it is a decision framework, not a mandate. For an airport executive, the practical move is narrower: pull the last runway-end risk assessment on file, check whether it answers ACI World’s five questions, and if it stops at the regulatory RESA boundary rather than at what actually lies beyond it, put a documented reassessment in front of the board before the next capital cycle, not after an incident forces the question.
