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Comment by bdavis__ | Hacker News Reader

Aviation safety is incredible. "Events" happen. But all the people got out.

This works due to regulation, training, and an honest evaluation of every incident that forces changes in the system.

Note that while all passengers and crew onboard the aircraft survived, there were two fatalities among the fire engine crew

Survived, yes, but

> The flight carried 102 passengers, 36 of them got injured of which 4 seriously injured.

The event in the article is pretty clearly a breakdown of already-known safety practices, so anything that gets learned is being re-learned. Ground vehicles are never to enter aircraft movement areas without tower clearance. In this case either the rescue vehicles did not have clearance or the tower cleared them improperly.

There are often multiple ATC positions staffed to cover the movement areas.

“Tower” is in charge of the runways and “ground” in charge of the taxiways. Both are movement areas.

Based on the charts and the video, I don't think these rescue trucks needed to cross a taxiway before crossing the runway. I listened to the recordings on liveatc and nothing jumps out. In the interests of open mindedness I should consider that it's not impossible that the ground vehicles had clearance and the aircraft did not. But it would be pretty shocking for a commercial air crew to take off without clearance.

Do you have a URL for a current chart? The old, single runway config would require proceeding on taxiway A to get to 34. The latest chart I could find online was 2019/2020, but there’s no way to get to the runway without transiting a taxiway on that side.

https://pe.ivao.aero/storage/download/cartas/1595026538_cart...

That's the same chart I googled up. Judging from a quite recent press release it seems like the project is years behind schedule and the taxiway is at best inactive and it looks to me like it doesn't really exist yet, still under construction. Aerial imagery from this year on Google Maps shows it as bare dirt. This image[1] from the October 22 press release seems to show the new taxiway as under construction.

The final thing is the video from the passenger on TikTok shows the rescue truck kicking up a cloud of dust, making it seem like they were crossing bare earth.

1: https://static1.simpleflyingimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/...

> But all the people got out.

Two people died.

People in the truck died, not people in the plane.

Bad luck to hit a firetruck but also lucky there were a lot of firetrucks nearby!

Until the next 737 Max

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_MAX#Grounding_and_r...

Until the next company commits fraud to skirt regulations, yes.

Easy to do when there's no oversight and the company "regulates" itself.

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