The National Transportation Safety Board has published its preliminary report on last month’s deadly crash involving an Air Canada jet and a fire truck at New York’s LaGuardia airport, concluding communication failures and a lack of transponders in the truck played roles in the collision.
The report, released Thursday, said the truck’s driver heard instructions to “stop, stop, stop” over the radio, but did not realize the message was intended for them.
After the initial warning, the fire truck’s turret operator heard the controller say, “Truck 1, stop, stop, stop,” and realized the warning was for his crew. By then, the report said, the truck was already on Runway 4 as Air Canada Express Flight 8646 was landing.
The jet and the truck collided seconds after the plane touched down. Pilots Mackenzie Gunther and Antoine Forest were killed, and 33 people were injured, including six who had serious injuries.
But there is a system and it sounds like it works. It just wasn’t in place. The problem is not a technical one.
Those transponders aren’t free, and I bet that cost probably factored into why they weren’t there.
A virtual one would cover every vehicle at the airport without having to buy them all transponders, on top of tracking anything else.
ADS-B transponders look to be around $4k to $5k. That’s dirt cheap. These things are on small private craft. They’re well understood, standardized and certified. They don’t have trouble with rain or snow and they’re ubiquitous.
A new computer vision system would cost millions in development costs, certification, testing along-side existing systems, etc.
I feel pretty confident you’re solving the wrong problem.
I’m confused. Do you know what a transponder is?
That is exactly what a transponder is for. Tracking live location. How are you even intending to implement a virtual representation of a live environment without the moving things telling you where they are?!?
ADSB broadcasts the position in the signal. The receivers don’t do any triangulation or anything
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Computer vision is crazy cheap and we can do this alongside transponders.
You are unnecessarily argumentative
Eh, I deleted the comment cause I felt I was being an ass about something I didn’t know a lot about. That’s fair.
Still though, I struggle to understand how “rip out everything and replace it with a different system” is more cost effective than “just put a transponder in the damn truck”. You say this was probably a cost cutting measure - you expect the people that cut that cost to now leap at the chance to overhaul their entire tracking system?
I don’t want to rip anything out, just add another layer of Swiss cheese.