United flight collides with truck and pole as it lands at Newark
cnn.comIs there something about Newark? The most frightening experience I've had on a commercial flight is breaking out of the clouds on approach to Newark and finding ourselves at an absurdly low altitude over a warehouse roof. Throttle up, go around, no comment from the captain.
Lots of old airports are a clusterfuck. Those places were built in the middle of nowhere 70-100 years ago but now find themselves practically inside the megacity.
Increased traffic and incredibly complicated approach routes does the rest.
What does being in the middle of a metroplex have to do with air and plane traffic incidences? The only thing I can guess is it constraining the airport to grow or remodel itself leading to perhaps inefficiencies.
Old airports have terrible runway design, the runways intersect (to save space) but this is dangerous and requires much more ATC coordination to manage. With modern runway design, if a plane takes off or lands out of sequence, it's unlikely to hit anything. With intersecting runways, that same accident becomes potentially fatal. These airports were also designed for smaller planes, fewer planes, and less passengers.
These issues are obvious to airport management, but airports cannot expand because nearby land is already allocated. The easiest option is to build a new airport, far from existing development.
Most of these airports were originally built far away from the city, but in the past half century the cities expanded so they new envelop the airport.
Less room for error, can't build extra runway(s) to cope with increasing demand. The current Mentour Pilot video actually discusses this issue in some depth re one of Washington DC's airports.
I've had the same experience on approach at night by the river near the Grand Rapids MI airport. And a thrilling non-landing at O' Hare where instead of touching down, we suddenly accelerated like crazy for a go-around in crowded airspace.
No comments on either of those. At least that pilot in Orlando who slammed on the brakes before we actually took off came on and said a cockpit window was open. Ok...
It's in one of the busiest airspaces in the world.
Dashcam footage, ostensibly from the bakery delivery truck which was struck: https://avherald.com/h?article=538bd859&opt=0
Higher quality video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdoLjsp5hkM, you can see the landing gear just after 8 seconds for one frame.
The driver's exclamation after being struck...
"Oh shit!" indeed.