30 ms·

Makes perfect sense. If the emergency crews are attending to a situation somewhere else in the airport, there's now no emergency facilities available in the eve

Makes perfect sense. If the emergency crews are attending to a situation somewhere else in the airport, there's now no emergency facilities available in the event of another emergency happening to another plane that's departing or landing. This poses a serious risk. It's safer to just stop operations and divert inbound flights to one of London's other airports, Gatwick being a prime candidate due to its distance and facilities.

stcredzero 13y ago
> there's now no emergency facilities available in the event of another emergency happening They only have the ability to deal with one emergency at a time? That strikes me as sub-optimal, especially if the "emergency" is contained within a single parked aircraft. Diversion is probably costing all the airlines involved a ton. I think it would be worthwhile for emergency facilities to have a backup.
- ceejayoz 13y ago
  I can deal with two servers being down at once at work, but I'd prefer to only have to deal with one. Same thing with airports, I'd imagine.
  - stcredzero 13y ago
    Yes, but you're not diverting traffic with one server down, "just in case," are you?
    - kintamanimatt 13y ago
      If a server goes down it might be an inconvenience and a bad day, but if a plane goes down it could be a fire and hundreds of deaths.
      - stcredzero 13y ago
        I'm not sure your analogy fits. The plane was already "down" and there was already a fire. However, it should have been apparent there was not to be hundreds of deaths.
    - ceejayoz 13y ago
      I might avoid running an upgrade on the rest of my servers while I troubleshoot the broken one.
- kintamanimatt 13y ago
  I'd imagine they'd send all their resources to any given emergency, no matter what size they think it is at the outset rather than be faced with a situation in which they've responded inadequately. This would mean that if there were another emergency on one of the active runways (burning plane with passengers, for example), they'd not be able to respond with their usual full force which could lead to deaths and bad PR. I can see in this situation they'd rather temporarily suspend operations than have a diminished emergency crew. As for the cost, yes, but airlines are fairly risk adverse creatures and I'd imagine they'd have adequate insurance to cover such eventualities.
- jccooper 13y ago
  Why would you size for multiple incidents? One is rare enough, but you have to deal with it. Two guarantees a whole set of people and equipment that will never have a use. Anyway, I suspect the real reason is that an emergency is a dynamic situation, and an airport is a large complex barely-controlled environment. Sure, probably parts of the airport could stay in use, but it would take a lot of coordination and analysis to do so safely, and there's really no time to do that. So you just shut it down. You know what's going on now, so it's easy to say; but if you're running the airport and all you know is "aircraft on fire", what do you do?

stcredzero 13y ago

> there's now no emergency facilities available in the event of another emergency happening They only have the ability to deal with one emergency at a time? That strikes me as sub-optimal, especially if the "emergency" is contained within a single parked aircraft. Diversion is probably costing all the airlines involved a ton. I think it would be worthwhile for emergency facilities to have a backup.

ceejayoz 13y ago
I can deal with two servers being down at once at work, but I'd prefer to only have to deal with one. Same thing with airports, I'd imagine.
- stcredzero 13y ago
  Yes, but you're not diverting traffic with one server down, "just in case," are you?
  - kintamanimatt 13y ago
    If a server goes down it might be an inconvenience and a bad day, but if a plane goes down it could be a fire and hundreds of deaths.
    - stcredzero 13y ago
      I'm not sure your analogy fits. The plane was already "down" and there was already a fire. However, it should have been apparent there was not to be hundreds of deaths.
  - ceejayoz 13y ago
    I might avoid running an upgrade on the rest of my servers while I troubleshoot the broken one.
kintamanimatt 13y ago
I'd imagine they'd send all their resources to any given emergency, no matter what size they think it is at the outset rather than be faced with a situation in which they've responded inadequately. This would mean that if there were another emergency on one of the active runways (burning plane with passengers, for example), they'd not be able to respond with their usual full force which could lead to deaths and bad PR. I can see in this situation they'd rather temporarily suspend operations than have a diminished emergency crew. As for the cost, yes, but airlines are fairly risk adverse creatures and I'd imagine they'd have adequate insurance to cover such eventualities.
jccooper 13y ago
Why would you size for multiple incidents? One is rare enough, but you have to deal with it. Two guarantees a whole set of people and equipment that will never have a use. Anyway, I suspect the real reason is that an emergency is a dynamic situation, and an airport is a large complex barely-controlled environment. Sure, probably parts of the airport could stay in use, but it would take a lot of coordination and analysis to do so safely, and there's really no time to do that. So you just shut it down. You know what's going on now, so it's easy to say; but if you're running the airport and all you know is "aircraft on fire", what do you do?