Global Courant
The news
An airline passenger in Thailand had part of her leg amputated this week after an accident on a moving airport walkway, Thai authorities said.
The accident, involving a 57-year-old woman, occurred Thursday at the domestic terminal of Don Mueang International, the older and smaller of two major airports serving the capital Bangkok.
It is unclear what exactly happened. Local news media initially reported that the woman’s leg had been pulled into the gangway’s machinery after tripping over her suitcase. But her family said on Saturday she had been walking normally when part of the walkway collapsed.
What is clear is that her leg was amputated up to the kneecap after the accident. Thai authorities are now trying to determine whether the accident was the result of human error or equipment failure.
Why it matters: Walkways are widely used and rarely feared.
Such walkways are known as “moving walksto government regulators and construction companies. Moving walkways are often mentioned in the same breath as escalators because they use similar technology and moving at about the same speed – generally 100 feet per minute, or a little over 1 mile per hour.
The main difference is slope. An escalator is set at about 30 degrees, but the inclination of an moving walk is usually no more than a tenth of that. Many moving walks are flat.
Escalators and moving walkways facilitate the movement of billions of people through airports, shopping malls and other public spaces each year. The National Elevator Industry, Inc., an industry group in the United States, estimates that approx 105 billion passengers ride escalators annually in the United States alone — the world’s population multiplied by 13 —.
Escalators and moving walks are generally considered to be very safe. But, like virtually any form of public transportation, they occasionally malfunction.
In Australia, for example, inspectors found in the state of Queensland two recent examples of moving walks that worked with a missing pallet, the technical term for the metal slats that separate passengers from the humming machines below.
And in Thailand, a passenger at Don Mueang International Airport reported losing a shoe to the machines of a moving walk in 2019, Thai news media reported this week.
Background: How likely is an accident on an airport walkway?
Data on the safety of moving walkways is scarce. But based on escalator safety data, the answer is “not bad.”
An average of two deaths per year in the United States involve escalators, lower than the figure for elevators, according to a 2013 review of US government data by the Center for Construction Research and Training, a Maryland-based non-profit organization.
The risk of injury is higher: About 10,000 escalator-related injuries result in a trip to the emergency room in the United States each year. But even that figure is extraordinarily small when you consider the sheer number of escalators and moving walkways people make every day.
In Thailand, the moving walkway where the accident occurred this week has been used by Don Mueang International since 1996, the airport’s director, Karant Thanakuljeerapat, told reporters.
Don Mueang carried more than 13 million domestic passengers last year, and nearly twice as many in the years just before the coronavirus pandemic, according to government data. So for nearly three decades, a moving walk there could have carried many tens of millions of passengers.
