Posted on 03/05/2015 10:36:36 AM PST by lowbridge
A passenger plane skidded off a snowy runway at LaGuardia Airport, smashing its nose through a seawall fence and breaking off a wing Thursday morning.
Everyone on board is “safe” and there were no serious injuries, but some of the 135 passengers and five crew members on board suffered “bumps and bruises,” sources said.
At about 12:30 p.m., a middle-aged black man who appeared to be in shock was seen getting wheeled on a gurney through Terminal D, where the passengers were being examined and treated.
Fuel was leaking from the MD-88 jet and emergency responders were spraying foam to prevent a potential fire.
Sources said Delta Flight 1086 from Atlanta was landing when it slid off the side of Runway 13 around 11 a.m. It came to rest with its nose hanging over a Flushing Bay seawall.
Passenger Sam Stern, 64, of Sarasota, Fla., was seated in an emergency-exit row and had to yank out the window so everyone could escape.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
“I know little about LaGuardia (other than what I observed landing as a passenger a couple of times), but couldn’t New York City and the state greatly increase passenger safety, while at the same time eliminating a longtime scandal and drug-plagued correctional facility, by closing Rikers Island and extending both main LaGuardia runways over to the island? Build a new state-of-the-art prison out in the boondocks somewhere, demolish the old Rikers facilities (maybe leave some as a museum, like Alcatraz), then set the earth movers to work.”
Then you have to build some really high walls, send in Ernest Borgnine in a cabbie outfit, get Kurt Russell and Adrienne Barbeau back in there with Harry Dean Stanton.
THAT would be a cracker jack prison!
No, seriously, LaGuardia’s not that bad an airport. I can only imagine how crowded it would be getting into NY/NJ without it.
They all have some degree of gun and drug running going on. This is Obama’s transformed America, after all. I have Baraq’s personal email server here in my home office.
Any landing that everyone walks away from is a good landing.
Any landing where the aircraft can take off again is a great landing.
The television coverage is unbelievable. It is a nothing story being made out like one of the worst disasters of the twentieth century.
That's my point. Using the several hundred acres of Rikers Island would not only allow both runways to be dramatically extended (LaGuardia has some of the shortest runways in use in major city airports), but also might provide enough space for construction of two additional runways paralleling the existing ones. Both improvements would greatly increase capacity in some of the most congested airspace in the world.
Just a few score billions of dollars and it's done, I'm sure. Finance it with a $20/30 landing & departure fee.
Supposedly the plane landed with a 16kt tailwind...
Other reports claimed winds from the North at 9 mph (pilot landed on runway 13, so that is likely also describing a tailwind).
It was the side of the runway according to the post. ;-)
I knew it was too soon for Wi Too Lo to start flying again.
One report said that the airport had plowed the runway just prior to the aircraft landing. The airport should have the capacity to conduct a friction test, called a mu test. This uses a vehicle with a fifth wheel that simulates an aircraft braking. The test produces a numerical value that can tell a pilot, based on his aircraft, weight, etc., how much friction he can expect on the runway. Prior to the aircraft landing, I wonder when the airport conducted a friction test of the landing runway.
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