Airport officials are planning to lengthen the safety zone at the end of the longest and most heavily used runway at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.
The effort will bring the airport into compliance with federal safety standards that say runways must have safety areas that start 600 feet before a runway and extend 1,000 feet past it by 2015.
Reagan’s north-facing Runway 1 has a buffer zone of 700 feet at its north end, the only one of the airport’s three runways that falls short of the Federal Aviation Administration guidelines.
The Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority, which oversees Reagan National and Washington Dulles International airports, is proposing to move the runway 300 feet to the south to make room for the required extra 300 feet of safety area at the north end.
The safety areas exist to prevent passenger injuries and aircraft damage when airplanes land short of the runway or over-run it.
“Reagan National has water on three sides, so the runway is shorter maybe than what would be desirable, but it’s certainly long enough for the aircraft that operate there,” FAA airports district office manager Terry Page said.
The airport’s 6,869-foot main runway accommodates planes as large as Boeing 757s, but is too small to host Boeing 747s and other similar-sized aircraft, MWAA spokesman Robert Yingling said.
The proposed runway shift would not extend the length of the runway — and thus its capacity to hold larger airplanes — but would simply move the runway area 300 feet south, Yingling said.
“This will keep our runway in full FAA compliance into the future without growing the capacity of our airport,” he said.
Some airports are restricted by land or environmental factors from building out their runway buffer zones to the recommended lengths, Page said.
The regulation requires those areas to improve their safety zones to the “extent practicable,” he said.
