Was curious if ground vehicles at airports also use transponders to communicate position to the radio tower, and it turns out the FAA put out a report last year on potential solutions to avoid this exact situation:
Crash probably a couple seconds later, wouldn't rely on the video for the exact timing.
So it seems that ATC made an error by allowing the truck to cross, and then the order to stop wasn't communicated clearly enough. I wouldn't place much blame on the truck.
Edit: Looking at some other videos with that audio, I'm also not sure if the video I linked represents the time between communications correctly, transmission at 3:15 may have been right after the one at 3:02. Anyway, the best thing is to wait for the investigation.
The only negative I can think of is that it will generally involve accepting and responding to clearances on short final. I think adding more tasks to that critical stage of flight probably increases danger a little. Especially for low time student pilots like myself. That's particularly relevant in the U.S. because we have a higher percentage of student and private pilots than most of the world.
Overall, though, I'm fully convinced this would be safer.
Transponder doesn't alter the laws of physics for the landing plane you just cut off. I guess it gives ATC a ~5sec jump on telling some other flight to go around.
I'd bet a lot of money that however the system is implemented the police and fire get special treatment when it comes to process (i.e. asking permission before they go somewhere planes might be) and that is part of what lead to this.
> I'd bet a lot of money that however the system is implemented the police and fire get special treatment when it comes to process (i.e. asking permission before they go somewhere planes might be) and that is part of what lead to this.
I highly doubt that any system would intentionally give ground vehicles of any kind special treatment on an active runway.
The trajectory of the plane is obvious enough that it should be able to predict where it will likely be in 30 seconds or a minute. You can't cheat physics, if it is going down in direction of runway, it is landing or at worst will do go-around, so the services should be alterted runway is no-go automatically
It was night time so idk how obvious it would be that a plane is approaching when you're in a firetruck and probably have a million others things going on that all necessitate your attention as well.
https://www.faa.gov/airports/airport_safety/certalerts/part_...