Hi,
This is my first post. I am not a pilot but a junior engineer. I would like to gather some opinions regarding the RESAs.
Close to where I live there is this airport ( A Coruna, ICAO’s code: LECO, IATA: LCG
AD - Aerodromes - Navegacion Aerea - Aena.es - Spanish airports and airspace )
with a 1940 meters runway (so code number 4 according to ICAO), which has around 10,000 operations per year and serves around one million passengers per year. On each side of the runway it has the 60m strip plus 90m RESA, so the bare minimum required by ICAO.
The shocking thing is that it is on a plateau, so just after the end of the RESAs there are vertical cliffs of up to 60ft.There are no EMAS or similar system, the RESAs have a downward slope of around 5% which makes them even less effective and due to weather conditions the it often operates in wet conditions and even with a bit of tailwind (there are not instrument procedures to land on runway 03 or take off from runway 21).
My first question is, even if the airport satisfies the Annex 14, isn’t this situation a bit dangerous? I mean, surely the Annex 14 does not say anything, for example, about nuclear reactors, but I would not put a nuclear power plant 500 meters after the end of a runway.
I find even more surprising the fact that the runway and strip are going to be extended 400m to allow the operation of larger aircrafts (even if there is already a nearby airport, SCQ, with some 3200m runway), but the RESAs will still be kept at the bare minimum.
To me this sounds a bit crazy: extending the runway by 400m would allow the displacement of the thresholds 150m from the ends and it would still get
TORA=2190 TODA=2490 ASDA=2190 LDA=2040
which would put leave cliffs at 300m from the end of the thresholds and would still be an improvement over the current situation ( TORA=1940 TODA=2090 ASDA=1940 LDA=1940).
What are your views: am I being too picky, is this crazy or somewhere in between (not ideal, but acceptable)?
Thanks!