Recently I watched this video on You Tube about the plane that ran out of fuel halfway across Canada and had to GLIDE for about 20 minutes and finally landed safely on an old Canadian Air force runway.
The runway had been turned into a drag strip and there were people there for the weekend but had luckily stopped the racing for the day and were camping next to the runway. It is called the Gimli Glider episode. (an incredible landing by the way)
When this 767 came gliding in to land, the people on the ground couldn’t hear it coming and there were actually two young boys riding their bikes on the runway who barely escaped.
Anyway, it reminded me of a time around 1975 or so that I witnessed a small single engine plane that had taken off from the Santa Monica CA airport and had immediately lost the engine. I was at a park with friends playing softball and we heard a pop and then saw the plane make a big turn thinking it could land on the large grassy area beyond the ball fields.
Unfortunately, there were dozens of young kids practicing pop warner football in that area and they didn’t hear us screaming at them to get off the field because they were pretty far away. It was a large park and would have been a perfect place for an emergency landing. (the plane flew over the park and landed on a residential street and nobody was hurt but the plane, which lost a wing on landing when it hit a light pole. (sorry this is so long)
My question is why don’t planes have some sort of emergency warning device like a very loud siren to warn people on the ground of an emergency landing?
Yeah, it’s like asking why planes don’t have ejection seats or parachutes for the passengers.
The FAA looks at proposed safety measures, and is supposed to calculate the cost in dollars per life saved. (I just googled for it, found hundreds of references to this principle, though not a single link that definitely establishes what it is in dollars today)
A life is worth somewhere between $600,000 - $3 million, depending on which source cites it.
You mention 2 people in the way of the plane who might have died. Given how rarely this even occurs, and you would have to equip every aircraft with a warning siren, well, you see the problem.
And of course, the reason no-one could hear the Gimli Glider was that the engines weren’t working. If they had been it would certainly have been audible. How often does an airliner make an engines-out landing somewhere that isn’t actually a commercial airport?
Some airplanes do have horns. I believe Boeing has some ground alert horns in some of their jetliners. However, I sincerely doubt there’s any procedure for blowing one when you’re otherwise busy making an off airport landing.
Not only would it be used very rarely, but you have to consider the tradeoffs of having them installed. Something would have to power it, and it’s only needed when the engines are out. If it activates automatically, that’s one more thing that can break. If it’s supposed to be activated by the pilot, that’s one more thing for him to do at a time when the workload is going to be very high already.
Part of the reason the plane ran out of fuel was due to the metric system. So you could make an argument that we should avoid the metric system as a means of preventing airline crashes.
But it wouldn’t be a very good argument. You have to look at what’s reasonably likely and not try to prevent everything.
I suppose you could use an air-powered horn, which would just be going constantly due to the passage of air through it, but I don’t know how loud it’d need to be to actually be effective, or what the cost in air drag would be.
No, the problem was the British measures. The pilot has requested the fuel in gallons and get it in liters. Or maybe he asked for it in kg and got it in lb. But it is an argument for universal adoption of SI.
Given that the “Jericho trumpets” used on the Ju87 Stuka dropped the airspeed by 10-20mph in a vertical dive, I can imagine it wouldn’t be popular as a ground alert device on an aircraft that has lost power and is in a terminal glide.
It was the conversion factor that was the issue. Pilots think of fuel by weight, but the guy who operates the refueling truck thinks in terms of volume. They used the figure for converting to lbs but thought they’d converted to kg. So they only had half as much fuel as they needed.
This was around the time Canada was converting to metric, and people were confused.
*emphasis mine
You don’t give the actual YouTube link, but if it’s the TV movie they made about it I think the part about the kids on bikes on the runway narrowly getting out of the way was artistic license (i.e. it didn’t really happen).
Besides, aircraft landing speeds are slow for airplanes, but fast for humans. The horn would have to be very, very loud to be heard at a distance at which people could hear it in time get out of the way of a landing.
By the way, I have watched many of these plane disaster videos and these dramatizations are far superior to anything that a “Bruckheimer” could produce. The actors are especially good.
When I said “cheesy” in the other post, I meant cheesy Hollywood “artistic license”
