Air France 358, on the other hand, suffered serious damage and did catch fire. Two days after the incident, the Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA) released a hotly worded statement taking the Toronto airport to task for failure to construct an adequate stopway zone or install arrester gear at the end of runway 24L. Many runways are built with designated stopways, sometimes extending a thousand feet or more beyond the runway itself. Others feature crushable concrete aprons called "soft ground arresters" that are designed to catch and decelerate an errant plane -- roughly akin to those accordion-like impact absorbers seen along highways.

Regrettably, runway 24L has neither. Worse, the terrain off the end is cleaved by a hundred-foot-deep ravine. Into this ravine is where Air France flight 358 went wallowing, fracturing its fuselage and fuel tanks along the uneven ground.

"The crash of Air France 358," states the ALPA communiqué, "occurred at an international airport that, unfortunately, does not meet international standards. It is the latest in a series of airline accidents that highlight the dangers of inadequate runway safety areas."

The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) recommends that all runways have a defined overrun path free of obstacles. But, says ALPA, "Dozens of U.S. and Canadian airports, many of which service large metropolitan areas with large, international aircraft, do not meet [these] standards."

ALPA points out that in 1978 an Air Canada DC-9 wound up in the very same ravine as Air France, resulting in two fatalities after the aircraft cracked into pieces. It also notes that both the Charlotte (Piedmont, 1986) and La Guardia (USAir, 1989) incidents could have been avoided with a modicum of obstacle-free space or arrester gear.

La Guardia has since installed arresters on one of its runways, and a total of 17 such systems are in place in the United States. They are credited with at least two saves. In 1999, a 34-seat turboprop left the paved portion of a runway at JFK and was halted by a newly installed strip of crushable concrete blocks. Only one minor injury resulted. Earlier this year, again at JFK, arrester blocks prevented a Polar Air Cargo 747, weighing more than 600,000 pounds, from plunking into Thurston Basin at more than 70 miles per hour.

ALPA's contentions are powerful and substantiated, but as always it's critical to maintain a healthy context. Because an airport does not meet the letter of ICAO's recommendations does not make it "dangerous" in any practical sense. Somewhere on the order of 40,000 commercial departures take to the air daily around the world, and the number of Toronto-style events over a two-decade span can be counted on one hand. Toronto itself handles some 400,000 takeoffs and landings annually.

There's plenty of room -- no pun intended -- for improvement. But not every runway can or will be 14,000 feet long, with pillows and fancy arresters at both ends. In the sort of statistical hairsplitting that is the heart and soul of air safety analysis, certain runways -- just like certain airlines and certain planes -- will always be slightly less safe than others.

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