Why you may soon feel safer taking off and landing at the Hilton Head Island Airport

Dozens of tractor trailers could soon be trucking down from New Jersey to deliver pieces of a $2.3-million safety system to the Hilton Head Island Airport.

The Beaufort County Council’s Finance Committee recently recommended approval of a contract that would allow the airport to purchase an Engineered Materials Arresting System, or EMAS. The system involves installing slabs of “crushable concrete at the end of the runway that provide a safe stopping mechanism for any kind of aircraft overrun — whether that be on take off or landing,” airport director Jon Rembold said earlier this week.

According to Federal Aviation Administration documents, “The tires of the aircraft sink into the lightweight material and the aircraft is decelerated as it rolls through the material.”

“A standard EMAS installation can stop an aircraft from overrunning the runway at approximately 80 miles per hour,” FAA documents show.

The EMAS would be installed at the north end of runway if the full County Council approves the contract later this month.

The south end of the runway is also in need of an EMAS, but a second system would have to be purchased through a separate contract, Rembold said.

The cost of the 206-foot-long and 120-foot-wide system — manufactured by the French firm Zodiac Aerospace — will be paid mostly with FAA grants, according to county documents.

Rembold said about 30 trucks would be needed to transport EMAS materials from the manufacturing site in New Jersey to Hilton Head Island.

It typically takes about nine months to deliver the materials, county documents show.

As of May 1, EMAS “safely stopped 12 overrunning aircraft with a total of 282 crew and passengers aboard those flights” since the systems were first installed in 1999, FAA data shows.

One of those incidents happened in 2006 in South Carolina at the Greenville Downtown Airport.

A $20-million Falcon 900 aircraft with five people on board had a brake malfunction “and it ran off the runway” at about 70 mph, airport director Joe Frasher said Wednesday.

The EMAS stopped the plane in its tracks with “no damage to aircraft and no injuries,” he said.

The safety system “definitely works as advertised,” Frasher said.

This story was originally published June 7, 2017 at 1:22 PM with the headline "Why you may soon feel safer taking off and landing at the Hilton Head Island Airport."