"The third one was this one ‘Crash Imminent’!
Ok so you can imagine that this one got my attention!"
I know how you felt. As a day job I'm a documentary cameraman and some years ago spent a week at Gatwick Airport's fire service to be the proverbial fly on the wall.
It was day one, an early start was required for some reason and I found myself at the station at 6am. But it was empty! A bloke in a red 4x4 pulled up and told me to jump in or I'd miss the action as they had a "shout" A typical false alarm I thought but I reckoned on getting some good dramatic pictures in the dark and was a little flustered that I was somewhat unprepared to be racing airside toward a fleet of flashing lights.
A few minutes later I'm as near the edge of a runway as I've ever been with the full compliment of fire trucks poised, engines throbbing, lights flashing in the cold otherwise eerily silent morning.
All very dramatic and atmospheric.
Then the bloke I'm with received a call saying "Crash imminent!"
I almost wet myself. It was a fully loaded DC10, with hydraulic failure. Asymmetric flaps?, no landing gear maybe?, bloody hell!
For a few minutes I thought that it was definitely going to actually crash right in front of me.
Then the nature of the problem eventually became apparent (to me) as a possible hydraulic failure, I realised that it wasn't actually a imminent crash but probably a dodgy cockpit warning light.
It landed without incident.
Is there a category of call out beyond "crash imminent?"
But a week after I left there was a serious accident, one of the tenders I had been riding shot gun in rolled into a culvert, the cabin flooded and the crew were lucky to escape with broken bones.
Definitely safer to travel by air!
Mickjoebill