At the very least 18 people died and 16 had been severely hurt in southern India on Friday just after a Boeing-737 overshot a runway regarded as a “desk-top” in the aviation marketplace.

The Air India Express aircraft, which was repatriating Indians stranded in Dubai thanks to the coronavirus pandemic, overshot the runway of the Calicut Global Airport in significant rain near the southern town of Kozhikode on Friday.

The airplane skidded off the runway, plunging into a valley and crashing nose-first into the floor, officials said.

What are Desk-top rated runways? 

Table-top rated runways are typically constructed by excavating the peaks of hills to generate what is known as a desk-best. This kind of runways have steep drops at one or each finishes, rising the probability of injuries and fatalities if pilots underneath or overshoot their solution, possibly by means of human error or mechanical failure.

They are most normally observed in mountainous areas where flat land is scarce, or in reduced-lying spots like Kozhikode exactly where area is at a quality or there is panic of waterlogging at ground degree.

Other illustrations incorporate the global airport of Nepal in mountainous Kathmandu.

The table-prime runway at Kozhikode is all around 2,700 metres (8,858 toes) extensive, shorter than the 4,430 metres (14,534 ft) runway in the Indian cash New Delhi, though it is very long sufficient for narrowbody aircraft like the Boeing-737 to land Friday’s crash was India’s worst passenger aircraft incident in a 10 years, that also included a table-major runway.

In Could 2010, an Air India flight landing at Mangalore airport overshot the desk-leading runway there, falling down a hillside and bursting into flames. Of the 166 people on board, only eight survived. The inquest into the crash later blamed pilot mistake.