It would appear that almost everything worked as intended at LaGuardia on Thursday night when Republican vice presidential nominee Mike Pence’s Boeing 737 had a hairy landing in bad weather. Whatever happened with the landing, the aircraft apparently ended up on the overrun and it stopped the plane the way it was supposed to. There were 37 people, most of them reporters, on the aircraft when it landed in heavy rain at LGA. Nobody was injured. A tweet from the New York Port Authority said the aircraft “overshot” the runway but it apparently overran the runway and that’s where more confusion was added by media reports that said the “tarmac” was “torn up” by the Boeing.
What likely really happened was that the plane entered “a field fabricated geotextile sheet measuring 8.4 hectares used to provide base reinforcement for the placement of approximately 400,000 m3 of fill over a 23 m thick layer of normally consolidated clay,” according to sciencedirect.com. In practical terms, the landing gear sunk into the engineered material at the end of the runway and the airplane stopped instead of going through the fence. Pence made his New York appointment and the reporters had a story to tell.
