If I was you, I’d make pals with the firefighters at the nearest Air Force, or better yet, Reserve / National Guard base. Being able to get you, or a camera, up close and personal with a runway is a lot more doable there than it will be at an FAA-supervised facility.
Do you mean on the rail, or between the rails?
If between, as you surely know, YouTube has a bunch of those cool sequences. Here comes the loco, then you’re looking at the endless onrushing procession of wheels and underside and couples and wheels and … Often the camera blows over so it’s looking straight up at the underside of the passing train a foot or so away. Such fun!
The aircraft reached a top ground speed of 127 knots [146mph], which is around the typical V1 (decision speed) mark. Nonetheless, the flight crew managed to stop the aircraft safely before dealing with the escalating engine fire situation.
It isn’t clear how the individual gained access to DEN’s runway. However, as per X account Turbine Traveler, there is a closed work zone near Taxiway P7 close to where the impact took place, suggesting it may have involved a construction worker who mistakenly entered the runway.
Though a reader notes: “Construction worker? Likely not at 11:20 PM, don’t you think?”
(I have seen construction at night, though, so it’s possible, no?)
Hmmm, interesting! Unfortunately, the two closest aren’t even in my state.
Between the rails. On the rails will crush it like that penny you put there as a kid.
That’s what editing is for. I don’t want to watch whole videos of things I was there & saw live, let alone something someone else filmed. I promise you, I’m not going to show the whole underside of a freight train…unless, perhaps, possibly, maybe I do it in timelapse. I also have a tri plate pod that should hold it in whatever position I leave it in since the base is so much bigger than the camera itself.
Taking off out of Denver in an A321 V1 may be a bunch higher than that. Also, depending on the specifics of the takeoff calculation, V1 may not the point at which stopping in the remaining runway becomes physically impossible.
What v1 always is, is the speed where by regulation, you should either already have hit the brakes, or you must continue the takeoff.
It is very common that if something really surprising happens just a bit short of V1, the airplane accelerates through V1 unnoticed, and a reject is then begun above V1.
Back in the day when the other pilot had to notice and call out the passage of V1, their distraction at that key moment with whatever just happened almost guaranteed a missed callout and subsequent confusion. Any reasonably modern jet now has automated V-speed callouts. The snazzy new A321NEO sure does. So the callout will happen on schedule.
But in the midst of a loud enough bang, a big enough swerve, having maybe just seen a flash of a human in your headlights, the auto-callout was simply unnoticed.
If they really did reject above V1, they will get criticized for that.
That situation occurred on this flight too: American Airlines Flight 383 (2016) - Wikipedia. The malfunction began very shortly before V1 and the crew initiated the reject a few knots after V1. They got the airplane stopped a half-mile short of the end of the runway and everyone got out alive although 21 folks were injured in the evacuation or from smoke. The right wing of the airplane then pretty comprehensively burned.
Had they chosen to continue and gotten airborne they probably would have reprised the Air France Flight 4590 - Wikipedia Concorde accident where the airplane became unflyable less than a minute after takeoff. They would then have plunged uncontrollably into the western suburbs of Chicago. With 100% fatality to the 170 people aboard, plus however many on the ground wherever they hit.
The crew still caught a bunch of guff from the Feds for rejecting above V1. The only reason they were alive to be bitched at was because they correctly rejected on the thesis the aircraft was, or was about to be, unflyable.
Late night construction is quite common at airports.
Yep. But assuming the vid is being streamed off the camera, you’d still get an interesting few seconds of "Here comes the rapidly growing giant wheel! BzzzTTttZXT!! [static].
And yeah, I know you don’t need to watch YT for interesting vids; you’re out there making them. But it was a good spot for me to plug the idea for others.
A V1 of 127 knots is pretty slow for an A321. You can get V1s in the 120s by using a short, wet, runway and light weights, but a typical take-off from a long runway will give something around 160 knots. Stopping from 127 knots at Denver should be quite straight forward.
On the topic of engine height, the A321neo engine pod clears the ground by 18 inches, so it will very easily collect a person mechanically without needing to suck them in.
Denver International Airport CEO Phil Washington said that an alarm went off at around 11:10 p.m. Friday and an operator on duty “reviewed the alarm and identified a herd of deer just outside of the perimeter fence.”
“They did not initially see the trespasser,” Washington said. “The camera view was alternating between the wildlife and the individual.
Maybe they need two fences: the first to stop the deer, and the second to alert and film trespassers (who to get that far must be humans).
This is reminiscent of something that hits close to home, Air Canada Flight 621 in 1970, a stretch DC-8 from Montreal to LA with a stop in Toronto.
Due to confusion about arming the spoilers versus actually deploying them, the FO accidentally deployed the spoilers while the plane was still in the air, causing the plane to hit the runway so hard that one engine broke off along with a piece of wing and leaking fuel started a fire.
Neither pilot realized the extent of the damage and initiated a go-around, resulting in multiple fires and explosions in the air and a fatal crash that killed everyone on board.
I’ve often wondered what would have happened if the captain had applied full brakes and such reverse thrusters as were still operable and tried to stop. I’m not faulting anyone as there was no way to know the best course of action in the moment, but there would likely have been many survivors in a much less catastrophic accident.
That’s called a refuge, actually. You have first-hand knowledge why.
I can’t remember which one but there was a western movie where the crew set up a mirror on a tripod and ran a stream locomotive into it while they filmed with a long lens at a 90-degree angle. They painted the number plate on the boiler front backwards so it would show up right in the mirror image. It was a spectacular shot.
I’m sure it has been done many times, but I happen to know it was also done for To Fly!, the iconic IMAX film made for the National Air and Space Museum in 1976.
The NYPost are getting soft in the online age. Was a time the headline would have been IDLE HANDS: LIMBS ON THE RUNWAY.
But seriously, small mercy that with the stopping distance involved the main carnage would have been left well behind where the passengers evacuated.
And yes, there’s the question of do you really want the perimeter fence to be more of a fortification. But with something as far-spread as Denver they may want to prepare for quicker response to intrusions.
I read that it alarmed but that:
a) there were deer in the area, I believe outside the fence &
b) Where it happened isn’t flat, there are some gullies & hills & that he was in the right (wrong?) place to be hidden from the camera view when they looked. IOW, they thought it was a false alarm.
When they went back & watched the video thru after the incident & saw him coming & going from camera view as he went up/down the terrain. It was also fairly quick from fence hop to ingenstion, not enough time to get an Ops car/PD out there even if they had caught it right away.
He chose a spectacular & pretty unique way to end his life that had the potential to take out a lot of others, too (what if the pilot swerved). No one’s life should end by intentionally causing their own demise. I’ve been on scene of too many suicides & I had no part in them until a 911 call was made. I can’t imagine what these pilots or a train engineer goes thru watching/being some part of it.
A federal jury in Chicago awarded $49.5 million Wednesday to the family of a young woman who was killed when a Boeing 737 MAX jet crashed in Ethiopia in 2019. The verdict resolves one of the last remaining cases stemming from two deadly crashes that killed a total of 346 people and happened within months of each other.
Samya Stumo was 24 years old when she died in the second 737 MAX crash.
