Somebody should get FIRED!

6t6

6t6

Pre-takeoff checklist
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Houston Hobby yesterday was train wreck. How does a Honda Jet in the grass shut down a major airport for 5 hours on a friday no less. Wasn't even buring and nobody hurt. Rumor is a low time Honda jet owner with a poor crosswind techique put hinself in the weeds. Happens.
But Airport city ops didn't have a contigency plan in place for such an event. Really?

No they had to bring a piece of heavy equipment from off the field to pick up that big ol' heavy jet. Ridiculous!
5 hours, all the cancelled flights and thousands of inconvienced customers and the cost of the impact to the network. City manager should fire the airport director. PPP.
yes I'll feel better.
 
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HondaJet is a pretty big airframe. I saw one a week ago in the shop in Des Moines. Nothing like a Cirrus VisionJet.
 
What level of contingency planning are we (Private or commercial flyers, or US taxpayers) willing to pay for? I'll go on the record that I don't want to pay for cranes and trained crane operators and riggers standing by to handle every possible contingency.

But 5 hours does seem like a long time. Maybe there were no appropriately sized cranes (plus operators and riggers) available nearby. Cranes (and crews) aren't like lawyers, just sitting around waiting on your call...
 
1 hr for initial response and things to settle1 hr of figuring out if/how they can pull it out and phonetag with various agencies. Meanwhile contacting joe dirts construction for equipment that takes another hour and a half to arrive another hr to extract the aircraft and 30 min for ops to check the cleanup. 5 hrs easy.
 
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Here I did the leg work
 
Ops check: See if it'll rip the bumper off.
 
Second ops check: one 5 hr delay in how many years vs spending that half million on airport improvements?

You also forgot the annual cost of insurance, maintenance and keeping many people trained to use it.
 
6t6 said:
But Airport city ops didn't have a contigency plan in place for such an event. Really?
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The contingency plan would have to address risk as probability of occurrence and consequence of occurrence as well as the cost of mitigation. Probablility something like once in five years maybe, consequence is a 5-hour shutdown. Losing 5 hours once in 5 years? Likely a very acceptable risk, no need for further mitigation.

And what would the mitigation be anyway? Having a half million dollar crane parked on the field, unused? Hah! Maybe a retainer of some sort with a crane company, but would their response be quick enough to sufficiently reduce the 5 hours to something like 1 hour? Doubtful....


falconkidding said:
Meanwhile contacting joe dirts construction for equipment...
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Make the call, turns out Joe and his equipment are working at a construction site two hours away. Cost for Joe to remove his equipment and halt construction for the rest of the day will put Joe out of business by the time his customer seeks redress. Joe tells you it'll be a day or two at least, or tells you to go pound sand.

Make the next phone call. Rinse and repeat. Eventually you find someone, but it'll take him time to load up and get to you.

Guys with these cranes need to keep them working as much as possible. They're not sitting around waiting for an airport crisis which rarely happens. And they probably don't have any insurance to cover inadvertent damage they may do, or even understand what it takes to move an aircraft, so they may turn you down even if they have a crane available. And they have to worry about not only damage to the plane, but accidental damage to the airport surfaces, lighting, etc., and they're using crane operators who aren't trained in airport operations.

Yeah, I can see that it could take a while to find someone who's both willing and available.
 
6t6 said:
...shut down a major airport for 5 hours...
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The news story indicates that it wasn't 5 hours; more like 3.5. Video shows the plane was pretty badly damaged. They likely needed some documentation and photographs before moving it, and there may have been concerns about things like fuel leaks, fire hazard, environmental damage, etc. Seems like it was a non-trivial problem.

Sounds to me like the airport did pretty well, all things considered.
 
Yea….Hobby should be prepared like Formula 1 corner stations. Crash, assess safety in a minute or so, evacuate driver to safety while ensuring corner worker safety, mobilize your $450,000 crane kept at the ready and latch up to the airframe at the established lift point using the standardized sling and move the airframe to a safe location where operations may resume. Sure, could be done with extraordinary crew training, practicing on a weekly basis for all types of anticipated airframes and situations. However, how much are you willing to pay for this in taxes/landing fees/ticket fees? Is the financial cost more or less palatable than the inconvenience? Sure, they could have just drug the aircraft off the field with a fire truck and cleaned up the FOD and been back in operation in much less time. But, if it was your aircraft how would you have wanted them to handle it?
 
I’d be rather nervous to see Bubba and Goober show up with their crane to move a 5 million dollar jet without an engineer present to instruct where to attach the crane fixture and oversee the lift. Lifting a Bizjet is a lot different than lifting concrete sewer pipe.
 
Bill insurance $100 per lost operation for time of airport closure caused by their insured aircraft. Watch the solutions manifest themselves. I imagine that honda jet would've been hitched to a Dually pretty quickly and dragged out of the way at an airport like Hobby to hasten its reopening.
 
Brad Smith said:
I’d be rather nervous to see Bubba and Goober show up with their crane to move a 5 million dollar jet without an engineer present to instruct where to attach the crane fixture and oversee the lift. Lifting a Bizjet is a lot different than lifting concrete sewer pipe.
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Which was probably another part of the delay…finding someone qualified to learn how to lift the airplane, taking the time to learn to lift the airplane, and then showing Bubba and Goober how to do it with the equipment they’ve got.

in one case that I’m familiar with, the Director of Maintenance for the factory-approved service center, who had the documentation in house, spent about two hours doing just that.
 
Brad Smith said:
I’d be rather nervous to see Bubba and Goober show up with their crane to move a 5 million dollar jet without an engineer present to instruct where to attach the crane fixture and oversee the lift. Lifting a Bizjet is a lot different than lifting concrete sewer pipe.
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Dude made a crappy landing and fouled up the airport. Maybe he doesn’t deserve to have his plane handled with kid gloves. Sometimes ya just gotta get the runway open.

 
luvflyin said:
Dude made a crappy landing and fouled up the airport. Maybe he doesn’t deserve to have his plane handled with kid gloves. Sometimes ya just gotta get the runway open.

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So, did you miss your appointment with the hooker, or what? Why does tha runway “gotta” be open?
 
I watched "Zero Dark Thirty" over the winter. From what I remember, when they had a helicopter with a problem, they just blew it in place with satchel charges.

If you could get that written into the airport's response plan, I'm positive that the firemen would love to try it out.
 
Albany Tom said:
I watched "Zero Dark Thirty" over the winter. From what I remember, when they had a helicopter with a problem, they just blew it in place with satchel charges.

If you could get that written into the airport's response plan, I'm positive that the firemen would love to try it out.
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I'd love to see how to do that without also blowing a divot or two out of the runway...
:)
 
Yeah, and there'd be big chunks of Honda falling all over the neighborhood, too. But that's the price of progress.

Below is similar to a real life version of "I thought Turkeys could fly":

 
I’ll try a picture , but reminds me. A relative has a heavy equipment business, construction. He gets calls at times with someone stuck, big stuff. Yes, it takes time to move to the site, take people off other jobs.

This is a tree harvesting machine in soft ground. I think when all was done, 3 other machines were moved to get him out. With this Honda Jet, yeah, an airport with less crosswind is the easy answer, with hindsight.

1FC32D76-5BD1-4844-BEE2-0C5A1FB654D5.jpeg
 
There have now been 18 runway excursions involving Honda Jets since 2015. Perhaps Honda needs to be tweaking the ground handling....
 
Where's Joe Patroni when we need him?
 
No idea on the size of the crane required; but the small suburban city I grew up outside DC had its own crane.
No idea what it was used for normally, but they used it one Friday night in the middle of a thunderstorm to cut down a tree that was going to fall on our house, and also two trees that would have fallen across the street and taken out the power lines.
We got the overtime bill for the city, I recall it being $400 bucks, and my dad also bought the crew a couple cases of beer as a thank you.

So I am kinda curious, where did Hobby get the crane?

Tim
 
This was too relevant to this thread to not steal from Friday is Joke Day and repost here.

upload_2023-2-16_12-27-50-png.115028
 
tspear said:
So I am kinda curious, where did Hobby get the crane?
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Dunno how kinda curious you are, but if it's kinda really curious, you could try to call and see if you can get transferred to someone who might know. (Guessing you won't, though.)
https://www.fly2houston.com/hobby-contact

This guy's office would certainly know who would have that info, but again...doubtful they'll actually transfer you there.
upload_2023-2-22_6-44-5.png
 
martym said:
There have now been 18 runway excursions involving Honda Jets since 2015. Perhaps Honda needs to be tweaking the ground handling....
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They are, actually. The company I fly for has been interested in possibly upgrading to a HJ, so I've been following them closely for a year or 2. My understanding is they've pretty much got the issues fixed with the Elite S. One of the factors was brakes, which they have an upgrade for. Another factor is too sensitive of nosewheel steering after landing. They offer a fix for that in an upgrade that is applicable to at least all of the Elite airframes, which increases the crosswind limitation as well.
 
So... Honda jet drivers have trouble with brakes and steering? I want to see Honda recommend some tailwheel training as a pre-req for flying their jets. :)
 
B9FDD63E-2831-46B5-A7D2-E089AE661CE8.jpeg $300/hr, half hour lead time. Rural Florida….

Prolly work.
 
I am curious, just NOT that curious.

Tim
 
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