SUV drives into Airplane!

[PepperElf]

http://www.wfaa.com/news/local/dento...177177461.html

http://www.wfaa.com/news/local/dento...177129811.html


The driver's take on this seems to be along the lines of "we've been hit by an airplane!" as if the pilot was the one who fucked up.

However from the news report in the first link, there IS a stop sign - painted on the ground - for the drivers.

The road in question and the airport are both privately owned - by different owners. So it's a bit of a tossup on whether or not the signage was adequate (or even legally enforceable), and who is ultimately responsible for the accident. (The private airline & private road owner seem to be of differing opinions on this - the road owner claims no one approached him about the signs, and the airline says they already tried to buy the land to enforce safety measures but their offer was declined).


although i guess there's a lesson here - look out where you're driving. especially if you're next to a private airport. including watching the actual road.


and edit: i mentioned this to my BF and his first answer was "you have to have painted signs - a normal sign would be FOD" (Foreign object Damage)." Meaning that a normal sign was there, there's a danger of it becoming dislodged and ending up inside an aircraft engine.

[Chromatix]

I believe there are dwarf signs that are more suitable for installing at an airport. They would often be supplemented with lights to make them more visible. At such a small airport as that, though, you aren't going to get jet aircraft that would be seriously at risk of dislodging a sign. Props produce winds comparable to a decent gale, no more.

What I notice from Google Maps however is that the runway has a displaced threshold at both ends. That means the aircraft should not have been trying to land at the very end of the runway like that - he should have been landing much further along it. If he had been following the correct glidepath, he would have easily been high enough to avoid any road traffic. This is confirmed by the couple of red lights standing up in the foreground and pointed towards the aircraft - these are the visual approach lights which are placed adjacent to the landing zone.

I'm currently installing my old copy of X-Plane, which should have a sufficiently accurate functional layout of this airport, to see what the approach looks like.

ETA: Sure enough, when flying according to the indicator lights, I cleared the road at a pretty decent height and landed well within the runway proper. But an inexperienced pilot, or one caught by a gust, might easily end up lower there. I think that the displaced threshold was put there largely because of the roads being obstacles to landing aircraft. Even so, it is *much* safer for road vehicles to *not* drive under the flightpath of a landing aircraft.

TL;DR version: As is usual, two mistakes were made and the combination of them caused a collision.