The Complex Engineering of Runways

Airport runways seem pretty simple, just another strip of asphalt or concrete not unlike the roads that our cars drive upon every day. We can even use these same highways as landing strips in a pinch, so you’d assume that the engineering for either isn’t that dissimilar. Of course, you can use a highway for an occasional emergency, but a runway that sees the largest and heaviest airplanes taxi, take off and land on a constant basis is a whole other challenge, as detailed in a recent [Practical Engineering] video and its transcript.

When you consider that an Airbus A380 the take-off weight is up to 550 ton, it’s quite clear what the challenge is for larger airports. Another major issue is that of friction, or lack thereof, as the speeds and kinetic energy behind it are so much higher. One only has to look at not only runway overruns but also when one skids off sideways due issues like hydroplaning and uneven friction. Keeping the surface of a runway as high-friction as possible and intact after hundreds of take-offs, tail-strikes and other events is no small feat.

Of course, the other part of runway engineering is for when things do go wrong and an airplane enters the runway safety areas, or overrun zones. This usually provides some flat and clear space where an airplane can safely bleed off its kinetic energy, with the collapsing surface of the EMAS technology being one of the best demonstrations of how this can be safely and dramatically shortened.

Another aspect not covered here that is part of these overrun zones are frangible structures, such as any localizer antennae of ILS, lighting, etc. Frangible here means that the structure easily collapses when a heavy airplane crashes into it without causing significant damage to the airplane.

It was the failure of such a design process that doomed the crew and passengers of Jeju Air Flight 2216 in December of 2024, when the airplane during an emergency belly landing skidded over the end of the runway. Although there was a lot of open space after the ILS localizer array with just a flimsy wall and further level fields, the ILS array’s base contained a poured concrete base on which the airplane effectively pulverized.

youtube.com/embed/ZJqY1WLX4zA?…

hackaday.com/2026/02/10/the-co…

All the current LLM coding agents build on advanced anti-bot measure evasion features that were initially designed by humans to solve the insane "grab all the things" problem LLM models have had. Now, nothing is safe on the Web, and you don't know what half-assed vibe-coded application will pummel senseless the websites you host for little to no reason as long as tokens run.

A few years ago I used to find it cute in Cyberpunk 2077 that the Internet fell to rogue AIs and that the only way to be safe was local-only networks. Seeing the scale and the race to add more computing power towards an ill-defined AI infrastructure wrecking havoc on all public web spaces, I'm not so sure anymore.

What if Google/Meta/OpenAI simply don't want to pull the plug if one of their creation finally glasses the open Web because they are afraid of dropping their share price? Corporations' action are so little connected to the real world it sounds like a plausible scenario.

Now I can clearly envision a devastated public Web where uncountable AI agents create and consume each other's nonsensical websites faster than any human can react to, while parallel whitelisted meshes would develop out of necessity.