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Comment by stephenr | Hacker News Reader

Did anyone else find it odd that it took 40 minutes to get the plane towed back to the terminal?

The article is a bit ambiguous to me about whether it was 40 minutes after landing or 40 minutes after they failed to restart the engines. The former is sensible to me since it'd take time for them to try to restart the engines and make sure the plane is otherwise safe (probably some kind of checklist to do as well). Some other articles on this explicitly say it was 40 minutes after landing.

I wouldn't call it ambiguous:

> The pilots followed their checklists and worked with maintenance personnel via phone to troubleshoot, but were unable to get the engines to relight. This left the aircraft stranded and led to the closure of the runway. A tow truck arrived some 40 minutes later to tow the aircraft off the runway.

It's ambiguous to me because the runway would presumably be closed as soon as the plane got stuck and not after waiting for the engines to restart. So the obvious reading of the sentence doesn't make sense.

No, not really. It's not an emergency response. They probably did not request it right away as they expected to restart the engines. Once it was requested, they had to find someone available to operate it who had to go get it, perhaps check the fuel and fluids, et cetera, et cetera. Depending on the details, 40 minutes could actually be considered quite quick.

The article indicates it took 40 minutes from after they'd tried to re-start the engines, etc.

To my reading, it is a bit ambiguous when that 40 minutes starts, but so what? I am still not surprised even if it took 40 minutes from the time it was requested for the reasons I already stated.

It might make me worry about their fire response capability. On the other hand, there's probably an element of triage involved here (no immediate threat once the runway was closed). More generally, I would expect problems that a tow truck solves to not be as urgent as problems that a fire truck solves, so garaging the tow truck farther away seems plausible.

Not anyone who's ever been on a commercial flight.

It probably takes 15 minutes to drive there, 10 minutes to hook up the plane and 15 minutes to drag it back. Seems to make sense to me.

It doesn't say "40 minutes to be towed back" it says "A tow truck arrived some 40 minutes later to tow the aircraft off the runway."

40 minutes for the truck to arrive?

I just answered OP's question.

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