I live near a military base, and there is a daycare, school, rec center, pub, ice rink, church, and grocery store, open to the public, and not managed by the military. All of it is on land owned by the military, but outside the wire.
The fact that these facilities exist on military land near a base (which a hostile government would surely argue IS the base) does not mean that the people in those buildings have it coming.
Technically the statutes of Rome forbid using human shields.
A nation state bombing US mainland bases sounds rather implausible, although I certainly would prefer that civilian infrastructure to have a minimum distance to military targets, even in the US, even if only to set the right example to the rest of the world.
I do believe there would be value in modernizing the statutes of Rome regarding human shields, which would force nation states to compile machine readable lists of school locations, so that non-existent reported childrens schools and secret childrens schools would be automatically screened.
Keeping the school secret, or reporting a school location too close to a military base would then activate the right of the international community to attack that nation, in order to prevent nation states from using elementary schools etc. as human shields.
IRGC wants nuclear ICBM's. Iran invests heavily in STEM education and physics. The whole population is aware of such goals, the whole population is aware of the adversarial relationship with the Western hemisphere. Imagine your child being allocated the school that was bombed in Iran, but before it was bombed: wouldn't you protest and ask for your child to be allocated to a different school? They risk being the first casualties when the inevitable escalation to war occurs. Clearly in this fun society of Iran, those parents didn't get a choice, and could only pray their kids get through elementary before such a foreign attack occurs.
IMHO, the most damning aspect is that proper, modernized international law clarifying the permitted action-reaction patterns around human shields could have prevented these deaths, by disincentivizing such nations from using kids as human shields.
I've driven a car that had about a 200 mile range (small fuel tank) and it's annoying on a long drive, given that you don't want to push it to the extreme but start looking for a fuel stop somewhere around 1/3 tank remaining. So you end up stopping to refuel every 2-3 hours. Still better than a 1-hour recharge every 300 though.
They were all, including truck 1, queued up at the stop line waiting for clearance to cross. Truck 1 received clearance to cross, he began crossing, then received instructions to stop after it was too late.
The rest of the emergency vehicles were stopped because they hadn’t been authorized. Truck 1 started moving because he had received specific instructions to do exactly what he was doing.
I take it you’re not a pilot, controller or someone who has ever worked an aviation radio?
"Truck 1 and company" were cleared to cross. A few seconds later, "truck 1" was instructed to stop.
Edit: Confirmed truck 1 was the one involved in the collision. Previous text: It is unclear which truck specifically was involved in the crash. In photos, the truck has the number 35 on it, not sure if that would preclude it from being identified as "truck 1" verbally.
Ah. I missed hearing that “and company” in the recording.
In any case, if they were cleared across the runway, and they were, it isn’t really on them. It doesn’t change the gist of the argument. The broader point is that it wasn’t that one truck was barreling around being reckless as implied by gp, it’s just that one truck made it out and the rest of the company had yet to start moving (whether because they saw the plane coming from their viewpoint farther back, or just hadn’t started moving yet, we will find out later). The entire company had stopped at the line, and when cleared across the lead truck was struck. Of course the rest were still stopped behind the line, there was a giant fire truck in their path moments before.
The instruction to stop is, to my pilots ear, irrelevant. Until an instruction is read back by the receiving party, it is worthless. It might not have been received, or received incorrectly. That’s the whole point of the readback, to ensure that the instruction was received correctly (notice how I missed the “and company”… a readback would have caught that). If there is not a readback, controllers are instructed to ask for one. On top of that, it was a panic instruction using non standard verbiage. If he was already past the line, the instruction to stop might have made it worse.
“I take it you haven’t ever worked with radio.. “. Seems like you haven’t a clue how any of this works. Doesn’t matter if they had radio clearance, the fire truck is responsible for ensuring runways is clear and not driving in front of plane.
I’m a certificated pilot in two countries, trained in this region, and own an airplane. I have a pretty good grasp how this works, but am willing to learn if you have citations besides the CFR pull quotes elsewhere in this thread.
All people (pilots included) are responsible for only following ATC instructions if it is safe/possible to do so. You aren’t supposed to land on a runway with other traffic on it, even if cleared. You aren’t supposed to cross a runway if there is a plane taking off or landing, even if cleared. You aren’t supposed to clear a vehicle onto a runway at the same time you cleared a plane to land (this one’s an assumption, I’m not a trained controller).
You are making the assumption that the truck did not check the runway, but keep in mind that it is a 30ish ton vehicle, and the plane was moving at 150 mph at touchdown, 100 mph at the time of impact. There very well may not have been a plane visible when the truck started moving. The truck might not have received the non-standard clearance revocation, or received it and tried to get off the runway by accelerating across, or received it and begun slowing in the path of the plane.
The truck driver could have prevented this, but they certainly aren’t the primary cause.
He was stopped until he received instructions to cross the runway from the person whose job it is to sit in a position with good visibility and tell people when they can cross runways. He wasn’t driving fast at all. The whole system is set up so that vehicles with blind spots (every large passenger jet) can safely move.
We can’t say that emergency vehicles should just stay in on dark and stormy nights.
>from the driver's seat the jet would be quite hard to see in this case.
..is what I was responding to.
>We can’t say that emergency vehicles should just stay in on dark and stormy nights.
This conclusion is flawed and doesn't apply to what I said.
If a truck can't see (conditions or not), then they shouldn't be on the same runway as takeoff/landing because...the consequences were severe despite the safeguards you mentioned, e.g. Not driving fast is relative and the "eyes" failed too initially.
“Vehicles with large blind spots don’t belong on the runway” is a completely untenable proposal.
Almost every airplane is bigger, blinder and slower than that truck. If it had been a plane cleared across the runway, this would have been so much worse.
Even if you want to exempt airplanes, it would require a complete rebuild of most major airports or using completely different emergency equipment. Every airport you have ever flown to commercially has ground vehicles crossing or operating on runways every day. It is simply not possible to operate a commercial airport without ground vehicles in aircraft movement areas, including runways.
The solution is not to spend billions on new trucks or access roads because of a single incident. It is to ensure that controllers, the people directly in charge of coordinating safe ground movement, have the mental bandwidth and tools to do their jobs. The fact that this was a truck and not an airplane is luck, making any discussions about truck cab visibility very much secondary. You have to go upstream of “trucks have blind spots” to truly prevent another of these incidents.
You even earlier: “ But if your truck has blind spots and vis is poor, you shouldn't be driving as fast if at all”
How do you propose that a truck not driving “at all” manage to drive on the runway? Driving on the runway, (or anywhere) is a subset of driving “at all”. Logically I can conclude that since you think that the trucks should not be driving “at all” due to blind spots, that you also think that they should not be driving on runways because of blind spots.
My argument paraphrased you to highlight a specific situation that would arise as a result of what you argued and to point out the folly of just banning any vehicle with a blind spot from crossing the runway. By extension, that planes can’t cross the runway either (the difference between a fire truck and an airplane crossing the runway is that the plane is larger, with bigger blind spots, less maneuverable, fragile and filled with people).
The solution is not to ban vehicles with blind spots from crossing runways, but to provide tools and guidance for those vehicles to operate safely. You could, for example, provide them with a trained observer in an elevated place that can be responsible for saying whether it is ok to be on the runway. We could give the person coordinating movement in the elevated place tools like radar mapping the ground, or automated semaphore systems at runway crossings (I’m describing things that already exist). Using a system like that we could do things like operate in 0 visibility where the weather causes the blind spot to be anything past the windshield (which is something that happens at JFK for example).
They aren’t violations if you are being punished. People who don’t take the deal and get sent to jail or put on probation typically lose those rights as well.
I don't think most people realize just how few people in the US obey license suspensions. Studies show the vast majority of people simply keep driving anyway.
The display has a refresh rate of 120hz when needed. The low refresh rate is for battery savings when there is a static image.
Variable refresh rate for power savings is a feature that other manufacturers already have (apple for one). So you might already be an early adopter.
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