The Long Landing Blind Spot

What our 2026 Global Data Sharing data reveals about the runway excursion risk your FDM program may be missing entirely.

We found something we didn’t expect

When we published the 2026 GDS Report, the headline finding was already striking: across 104,000 landings, our new Runway Remaining snapshot revealed that critically low stopping margins were exceptionally rare. While 8,095 Long Landing events were detected, only 47 landings had less than 500 feet of runway remaining at 50 knots groundspeed.

That story — that Long Landings are common but actual excursion risk is rare — was the one we told. But there was a second story buried in the data that we didn’t highlight. And it may be the more important one.

Of those 47 landings with critically reduced runway margin, only 8 were preceded by a Long Landing event.

83%

of the landings with
less than 500 ft of runway remaining
produced no Long Landing event whatsoever.

They were completely invisible to traditional monitoring.

That number is worth reflecting on. If your Flight Data Monitoring program flags Long Landings as the primary indicator of runway excursion risk, you would have missed 39 out of 47 of the most concerning landings in our entire dataset. That’s significant.

Why does this happen?

It comes down to what each metric actually measures — and the gap between them.

A Long Landing event tells you where the wheels touched down relative to a fixed runway threshold. It is a measure of approach energy and touchdown discipline. That information has genuine value: High Speed on Approach was the dominant precursor in our precursor analysis, and Long Landing monitoring does capture that signal.

But runway remaining tells you something fundamentally different. It tells you where the aircraft was when it reached 50 knots during rollout. Or, how much stopping room was actually left. And that number is shaped by more than just where you touched down.

The Mechanics of the Gap

An aircraft can touch down well within the normal touchdown zone and still roll out aggressively — due to late brake application, degraded deceleration, contaminated surfaces, or high groundspeed from a slight tailwind component — and arrive at 50 knots with very little runway remaining. No Long Landing event triggers and no alert is generated. The excursion risk existed and went completely undetected.

The inverse is also true: an aircraft can touch down long and still stop comfortably well before the end of the runway. And this is supported by our data. Many of the 8,095 Long Landing events were low or medium severity, and the vast majority had substantial stopping margin remaining.

Long landings are not necessarily a runway excursion problem. Similarly, runway excursions are not necessarily a long landing problem.

The monitoring gap this creates

Traditional FDM programs have long treated the Long Landing event as a proxy for runway excursion risk. It was a practical choice. Before GPS-derived positional accuracy became widely available, the approximate touchdown point or a particularly long flare were the most reliable signals you could extract from flight data. The logic was reasonable: if you’re landing long, you’re increasing your risk.

That logic isn’t wrong — it just doesn’t paint a complete picture. And our 2026 data quantifies exactly how incomplete it is.

This isn’t a reason to abandon Long Landing monitoring

To be clear: Long Landing events still matter. Approach discipline and energy management are core safety principles, and tracking them has genuine value for training and trend analysis. The precursor data in our report reinforces that High Speed on Approach is the dominant factor in reduced stopping margin — so anything that captures approach energy is worth retaining.

The problem isn’t that Long Landings are being monitored. The problem occurs when Long Landings are being treated as a sufficient indicator of runway excursion risk, rather than one piece of a more complete picture.

Safety programs built on legacy frameworks were designed around the data that was available. Today, with accurate GPS positional data and tools that can calculate runway remaining in real time, there’s no longer a reason to accept a proxy when the direct measurement is achievable.

What the data is telling us

The 83% figure is a gap in visibility, not a gap in safety — our 2026 data showed that participating operators maintain strong stopping margins overall. But that gap in visibility is real, and it represents events that were significant enough that we’d want safety teams looking at them.

Energy management during rollout — not just touchdown point — is where the stopping distance story is actually written. And that story requires a different instrument to read.

There’s considerably more in the full 2026 GDS Report: the precursor analysis across all 47 flights, the distribution by aircraft type, the environmental data showing that weather conditions were largely benign when reduced margins occurred, and a real-world case study where an operator used Sky Analyst findings to eliminate repeat events entirely. The data is worth reading in full.

This isn’t theoretical — it happened in Houston

In March 2024, United Airlines flight 2477, a Boeing 737 MAX 8 arriving from Memphis, suffered a runway excursion at Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport. The aircraft departed the paved surface, and the left main landing gear collapsed after striking a concrete electrical junction box. All 160 passengers and six crew were uninjured, but the aircraft was substantially damaged.

The NTSB investigation, with findings released at the end of 2025, revealed a scenario that reads like a case study for exactly what our GDS data uncovered. The touchdown itself was not anomalous. What happened during rollout was.

This captain was almost certainly not the only one “keeping the speed up” during the rollout. He just happened to be the unlucky one on this day. These systemic risks are exactly the types of things FDM programs are designed to catch before they turn into incidents, or worse.

NTSB investigation findings – UA2477, Houston, March 2024

The captain later told investigators he had habitually rolled to the end of the runway with minimal braking — a technique used to smooth the ride for passengers and reduce ground time — on “hundreds” of occasions. On this occasion, ATC had also instructed the crew to “keep your speed up” on approach, with traffic sequencing pressure behind them. The autobrake setting was reduced from 2 to 1 during the roll. The runway surface was wetter than the captain perceived. By the time the aircraft attempted a late-runway exit at speed, there was insufficient traction and stopping distance remaining to make the turn.

There was no long landing. The wheels came down where they were supposed to. But the aircraft arrived at its attempted runway exit carrying more speed than the conditions could accommodate, with very little runway remaining — and no FDM event had fired to flag any of it.

This is precisely the blind spot our data describes. The risk wasn’t in the touchdown. It was in the rollout energy management that followed, and it was completely invisible to a monitoring framework built around threshold exceedances at touchdown.

A runway remaining snapshot — capturing exactly how much pavement was left at the critical 50-knot point — is the kind of metric that would have made this event visible before it became an accident report.

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