5 Ways Our Customers Use FDM to Reduce Runway Excursion Risk

Runway excursions are back on the radar

In the first week of September 2026, a Part 135 Citation XLS overran a 5,960 ft runway at Porterville, California, and a Boeing 767 freighter ran off the end of Miami’s Runway 30, crossing a perimeter road and killing five people. A week earlier, an A320 overran on a wet runway at Cascavel, Brazil.

At the time of writing, none of these events has been formally attributed to a long landing, and it would be irresponsible to speculate while investigations run. But they are a reminder that runway excursions remain one of ICAO’s global high-risk occurrence categories, and IATA continues to rank them among its top safety priorities.

Every FDM program we’ve ever looked at has some sort of event to monitor for Long Landing. Even in the days before latitude and longitude were readily available, we would monitor for “floating” and “long flares” to try to identify cases where too much energy was carried to the landing. For an experienced program, the useful question isn’t whether you monitor long landings, it’s whether your event is measuring the thing that actually puts an aircraft off the end of the runway.

In this blog, we look at five practices that some Sky Analyst customers (business jet operators, regional airlines and cargo carriers in North America, Europe and Australasia) use to get more out of this one event. If you have an existing program, or are planning on starting a new one, you may find this information helpful to reduce your own risk of a runway excursion.

The problem with one number for every runway

Most long landing events start life as a fixed distance: flag any touchdown beyond, say, 2,500 ft from the threshold. It’s simple to configure and easy to explain to crews. It is also blind to the one variable that decides whether a long touchdown is a non-event or a serious risk: how much runway is left.

Here is what a fixed 2,500 ft threshold means across a typical network, compared with the “first third or 3,000 ft, whichever is less” standard many operators fly to:

Runway length	Fixed 2,500 ft limit, as % of runway	Lesser of 1/3 or 3,000 ft	Runway remaining at that limit
4,000 ft	63%	1,333 ft	2,667 ft
5,000 ft	50%	1,667 ft	3,333 ft
6,000 ft	42%	2,000 ft	4,000 ft
9,000 ft	28%	3,000 ft	6,000 ft
12,000 ft	21%	3,000 ft	9,000 ft
15,000 ft	17%	3,000 ft	12,000 ft

The fixed event gets it backwards. On a 12,000 ft runway it fires on a 2,600 ft touchdown that still leaves more than 9,000 ft to stop. On a 4,000 ft runway it stays silent on a 2,400 ft touchdown that has already consumed 60% of the surface.

That produces two failures at once. Analysts see a stream of long-runway events that don’t matter and learn to skim past them. Meanwhile, the short-runway landings that carry real overrun risk never cross the threshold at all. In our own Global Data Sharing (GDS) analysis, 83% of critical runway-margin events were invisible to traditional Long Landing monitoring.

1. Measure touchdown against the actual runway length, not a ruler

The fix is to express the long landing limit the way pilots are trained to think about it: touch down within the first third of the runway or the first 3,000 ft, whichever is less. The 3,000 ft figure matches the AIM definition of the touchdown zone. The one-third rule scales that down for the short runways where it matters most.

Worked through: on a 15,000 ft runway, the target is the first 3,000 ft. On a 6,000 ft runway, both limits land on 2,000 ft. On a 4,500 ft strip, it tightens to 1,500 ft.

This “Long Landing – 33%” event has become popular with our US customers, and it’s now spreading to European operators too. It has been especially well received by our business jet operators, whose missions take them anywhere from 12,000 ft international hubs to 4,500 ft regional strips in the same week. One of our business aviation customers has gone all the way and replaced every fixed-distance landing limit with a runway-percentage equivalent.

What it takes: a reliable touchdown detection, an accurate runway database (length, threshold position, displaced thresholds), and correct runway identification for every landing. If your system can’t tell which runway you landed on, it can’t compute a percentage. That last point is where many programs quietly fall down, so validate it before you trust the event.

2. Don’t rip out the old event: run both

Switching event logic mid-program breaks your trend history, and some stakeholders will want the familiar number. Several of our customers solved this by running the percentage event alongside their original fixed-distance event, with runway length deciding which one carries the weight.

In practice, the fixed event still earns its keep on long runways, where it catches touchdowns that are unusually deep by fleet standards even though stopping margin is ample. These represent more of an airmanship concern than a safety concern. The percentage event does the heavy lifting on short and medium runways, where margin disappears quickly.

Running both for a few months also gives you something valuable: a direct comparison of what each event catches. The landings that trigger the percentage event but not the fixed one are exactly the risk your old program was missing. That list makes a compelling slide for your next safety review board.

3. Use low and medium severities to watch the trend, not just the exceedance

A single high-severity threshold tells you when a landing crossed the line. It says nothing about how many landings are drifting toward it.

One of our airline customers added low and medium severity levels beneath the 33% limit, triggering as touchdowns approach the one-third point rather than only once they pass it. They don’t action every low-severity hit with crews. Instead, they use the lower tiers purely for trend monitoring: is the fleet’s average touchdown point creeping further down the runway? Is it one base, one type, one crew pairing, one airport?

A cargo operator we work with takes the same approach. Their safety team focuses follow-up on high-severity events and treats low and medium events as a leading indicator. This is a best practice for any FDM program.

This is where an FDM program shifts from reactive to predictive. A rising rate of medium-severity long landings at a particular short-runway airport is a conversation you can have with crews before anyone gets close to the end of the pavement.

Tip: set the lower bands as a proportion of the limit (for example, 80% and 90% of the one-third distance) rather than fixed offsets, so they scale with runway length the same way the main event does.

4. Cross-check touchdown point against runway remaining

Touchdown point is only half the story. An aircraft can touch down comfortably inside the first third and still arrive at a slow taxi speed with far less runway left than it should: a fast touchdown, delayed spoiler or reverser deployment, light or late braking, carrying extra speed for a distant taxiway exit, or a contaminated surface.

Most of our customers, including that same cargo operator, added a runway-remaining metric to its analytics, measured at a set speed (for example, runway left when groundspeed passes 50 kt), and track it alongside the long landing event. The value is in the disagreements between the two:

Touchdown	Runway remaining at 50 kt	What it tells you
Normal	Normal	Nothing to see
Long	Normal	Deep touchdown, recovered with good deceleration
Normal	Short	Deceleration problem: technique, configuration or surface
Long	Short	Highest risk; investigate first

The “normal touchdown, short remaining” row is the one a long landing event will never catch on its own. It’s also consistent with what our GDS benchmarking data shows: most critical runway-margin events aren’t long landings at all.

5. Ask the upstream question: was the approach stable?

A long landing is usually the last link in a chain, not the first. In a recent review with the flight safety lead at that same cargo operator, the discussion centred on a simple question: how many of their long landings were preceded by an unstable approach?

It’s worth asking of your own data. The classic contributors are high and fast at the gate, an extended flare to bleed off excess energy, or a threshold crossing well above 50 ft. The FAA’s rule of thumb is that every 10 ft above the standard threshold crossing height adds roughly 200 ft to the landing distance.

Linking your long landing events to approach stability events on the same flight turns two separate counts into a causal story. If most long landings follow an unstable approach, the intervention is approach discipline and go-around culture, not flare technique. If they don’t, look at the flare itself, and at tailwinds, runway slope and visual illusions at specific airports.

That operator flies into many short runways and is now evaluating the 33% event for exactly that reason. It’s a good illustration of how these practices compound: percentage-based limits, severity tiers for trending, a runway-remaining cross-check and a link back to the approach together give a far richer picture than one fixed-distance event ever could.

A quick self-check for your program

If you run an FDM program today, on any platform, these questions will tell you how much your long landing event is really telling you:

Is your long landing limit a fixed distance, or does it scale with runway length?
Does your system identify the landing runway correctly on every flight, including displaced thresholds?
Do you have severity tiers below the exceedance, and does anyone look at the trend?
Can you see runway remaining at a set speed, and compare it with touchdown point?
Can you link a long landing to the approach that preceded it, on the same flight, in one view?
When you want to change an event definition, how long does it take, and what does it cost?

If the answer to the last question is “weeks” or “a change order,” (or you can’t change them at all) your event set will stay frozen while your operation changes around it.

How Sky Analyst approaches it

Every example in this article came from an operator adjusting its own event set as it learned more about its risk. That’s how it should work. In Sky Analyst, percentage-based limits, custom severity bands and derived metrics like runway remaining are configured by our analysts for our service-based customers, and event definition updates are included at no extra charge. Enterprise customers have full control over their events and the programming of our EDEN event detection engine.

If you’d like to see how your fleet’s landings look measured against runway length rather than a fixed number, talk to our team. We’re happy to walk through it with your own data.