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Thai authorities say an airline passenger in Thailand had part of his leg amputated this week after an accident on a moving walkway at the airport.
The accident, which involved a 57-year-old woman, happened on Thursday at the domestic terminal of Don Mueang International, the older and smaller of the two major airports serving the capital Bangkok.
It’s not clear exactly what happened. Original local media report that the woman’s leg was dragged into the aisle’s machinery after she tripped over her suitcase. But her family said Saturday that she was walking normally when part of the walkway collapsed.
What is clear is that her leg was amputated to the kneecap after the accident. Thai authorities are currently trying to determine if the crash was caused by human error or equipment failure.
Why it matters: Walkways are widely used and rarely cause concern.
Such passages are called “move on foot” for government regulators and construction companies. Walking is often said to be like riding an escalator because they using similar technology and traveling at roughly the same speed — usually 100 feet per minute, or just over 1 mile per hour.
The main difference is the tilt. An escalator sits at about 30 degrees, but the inclination of a moving pedestrian is usually no more than one-tenth of that slope. Many walkways are moving flat.
Escalators and moving walkways facilitate the movement of billions of people through airports, shopping malls and other public spaces each year. National Elevator Industry, Inc., an industry group in the United States, estimates that about 105 billion passengers annual escalator rides — world population, multiplied by 13 — in the United States alone.
Escalators and walkways are considered very safe. However, like most forms of public transport, they sometimes run into problems.
In Australia, for example, inspectors in the state of Queensland found two recent examples of moving aisles in action with a pallet missing, the technical term for the metal bars separating passengers from the spinning machinery below.
And in Thailand, a passenger at Don Mueang International Airport reported losing a shoe due to moving machinery in 2019, Thai media reported. report this week.
Context: What is the probability of an accident on the pedestrian walkway at the airport?
Data on the safety of walking mobility is scarce. But if we go by the escalator safety data, the answer is “not very much”.
An average of two deaths per year in the United States are related to escalators, lower than the number for elevators, according to 2013 evaluation United States government data by the Construction Training and Research Center, a nonprofit group in Maryland.
risk of injury higher: Approximately 10,000 escalator-related injuries visit emergency rooms in the United States each year. But even that number is extremely small if you consider the sheer volume of the escalators and the hikes people take on a daily basis.
In Thailand, the moving walkway where this week’s accident happened has been used at Don Mueang International Airport since 1996, the airport’s director, Karant Thanakuljeerapat, said. told reporters.
According to government data, Don Mueang carried more than 13 million domestic passengers last year, and nearly twice as many as in years before the coronavirus pandemic. So, for nearly three decades, a single walking trip there could carry tens of millions of passengers.
