PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - Air France jet clips smaller plane at New York's JFK airport
Old 13th Apr 2011, 11:30
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hoppy906
 
Join Date: Sep 2009
Location: Bristol
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A few observations:

1. When trying to calculate taxi speed by using an anti-collision light that flashes, it is pretty essential to know the shutter speed of the camera in relation to the duration of the flash of the anti-coll. For example, you may have a frame rate of 25 frames per second, but your shutter speed may be 1/1000th of a second and the flash duration could be 1/100th of a second. Thus, it is quite possible that your resultant footage will be missing flashes altogether. During each 1/25th of a second, you are only capturing an image for 1/1000th of second. Of course at night it is likely that the shutter speed will be less than 1/1000th of a second, but hopefully you get my point.

2. It may well be that the PIC of the A380 is "to blame" both in principle and in law. But that doesn't mean he will be the sole cause. Blame = who will pay? Cause = what do we fix? In this case, I would be most surprised to find that there are not other contributory factors. Simply blaming the PIC will not prevent this kind of accident from happening again. Let's be clear, it's not just A380s that are involved in this kind of accident. They happen all the time with smaller aircraft too. Many big airports have procedures in place in an attempt to prevent accidents like this. That being the case at JFK, then any investigation will also look at what went wrong there. I'm pretty sure that a decent investigation won't simply blame the PIC and be done with it. You can compare driving a car to taxying an A380 if you like, but let's be honest, it really isn't as simply as that. They worked this out on railways ages ago and as a result you have signalling systems and interlocking to protect trains from one another. You could easily do something similar on taxiways, dividing them up into "block sections" and only allowing one aircraft per block. ATC wouldn't like that. Much easier to blame the PIC I suppose.

3. As a single example, here's a report from a recent collision at Heathrow. You may find it interesting, you may not.

Air Accidents Investigation: Airbus A340-311 Boeing 747-436, 4R-ADC G-BNLL

Have fun!
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