I bet that a confident scammer is prepared to deal with things like that. They want to put you in a state where you are under time and emotional pressure and your "relative" will have a well practiced response why they can't answer your weird questions.
Imagine your crying grandson who caused a traffic accident in Mexico and the police planted drugs in his car and now he needs money to pay them off. He is in pain and probably has a concussion (explanation why he can't remember what you are asking), the police is hassling him to get off the phone (time pressure, explanation why the quality of the call is terrible). Will you get hung up on some code word he asked you to memorise years ago and you can't even know where it is anymore? And if you bring it up he just starts crying and tells you that you are his last chance to turn his life around. And you remember when he was a wee little kid and he fell and scraped his knee and you comforted him. Just the thought of pressing him on the code makes you feel like a terrible person. Or not. And then the scammer just finds someone more gullible. Theirs is a number game after all.
> The emergency aircraft couldn't find a free gate, creating a massive distraction for ATC, airport, et al.
Yes. And I want to add one more thing to this: the airplane with the "odour" issue was kinda ambivalent about the danger. They deemed it dangerous enough to declare an emergency, and request a gate then later ask for airstairs but not dangerous enough to pop the slides and just evacuate right there and then. I'm not saying this is wrong. Obviously they were evaluating the situation as new information was coming in. But it increased the workload of the ATC. They were trying to find a gate, and etc. If it was a clearer "mayday mayday mayday, aft cabin fire, we are evacuating" that might have been paradoxically less "work" for the ATC. Or at least more of a "practiced" scenario.
> Perhaps it was some other misunderstanding of how that system works.
Yeah. That's a big one. Total speculation but maybe they thought the airplane with the "odour" issue was keeping it red?
I very much doubt that you know the exact timing of the event. My guess is that you might have seen a video where some industrious editor put the ATC recordings over the leaked surveilance footage, but there is no way that is correctly synced.
With publicly available information we can sync it to within ~2 seconds. All trucks other than the first one were definitely in the process of stopping in between the first and second time ATC told them to stop (5 seconds apart).
There is actually a set of lights which should have displayed red towards the trucks.
Were they not operating correctly, or did the driver ignore them is one of the questions the investigation will answer.
The system is called Runway Status Lights. And in case there is a disagreement between the ATC clearance and the lights the drivers are supposed to not enter the runway.
In the video it looks as if the other emergency vehicles have stopped and only the first truck is driving. Maybe they missed the light or it turned red just after the first truck passed the light.
The description is a bit vague, but I guess this should've automatically caught the landing plane immediately after it got the approval and started landing?
> When activated, these red lights indicate that ... there is an aircraft on final approach within the activation area
It is not working based on approval but based on sensors observing the airplane on final. Even if the plane is landing without clearance, even if the ATC is held hostage by a terorist or having a stroke the lights should turn red when an airplane is approaching the runway from the sky.
“RWSL is driven by fused multi-sensor surveillance system information. Using
Airport Surface Detection Equipment-Model X (ASDE-X), external surveillance
information is taken from three sources that provide position and other
information for aircraft and vehicles on or near the airport surface. RWSL safety
logic processes the surveillance information and commands the field lighting
system to turn the runway status lights on and off in accordance with the motion of
the detected traffic.”
> Does anyone know why the fire truck was driving across the runway in the first place?
Yes we know. There was an other airplane who declared an emergency and was about to evacuate the passengers on the tarmac. The other plane in question had two aborted takeoffs, and then they smelled some “odour” in the aft of the plane which made some of the crew feel ill.
There is such a bot and it is installed in LaGuardia Airport. The system is called Runway Status Lights, and it was supposed to show red lights to the truck. And the truck was supposed to stop and ask the controller: “If an Air Traffic Control clearance is in conflict with the Runway Entrance Lights, do not cross over the red lights. Contact Air Traffic Control and advise that you are stopped due to red lights.” https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/technology/rwsl
That is how it is supposed to work. How did it work in reality is an other question of course, and no doubt it will be investigated.
> Sound like the issue is whoever was driving the truck not doing what was asked of them for whatever reason.
Hard disagree. The ATC initially cleared them to cross the runway. The truck started moving, and just then the ATC realised that they made a mistake and tried to fix it. Even their first attempt at that was unclear, and they only clarified who should stop on the second attempt.
People can’t react in zero second, trucks don’t stop immediately. The ATC mistake was clearing them to cross the runway, whatever happened after was out of their hands.
That is just simply false. There are many boeings flying in europe. Just by randomly clicking around on flightradar24 I found multiple right now in the air.
> one by one these neurons are switched off with their functionality offloaded to their clone instantiated in a computer.
We are not just brains in a jar. Our bodies provide rich sensory information, and feedback loops without which we would definietly not be “us”.
To use the “Ship of Theseus” analogy you are proposing to replace all the parts of the cockpit with new parts, but you are also at the same time discarding the hull, the sails and the oars. It would not be the same “ship” without those other things. You also need to very precisely replicate/simulate those parts too otherwise you won’t have the same person.
Given that these are machine learning algorithms their performance will very much depend on the training dataset. So it is probably not (just) that “technology has moved on a lot”, but that the engineers working on it curated new training sets. It is not entirely unreasonable to think that they too read the paper you are talking about and made measures in an attempt to correct for the effect.
Cameras are much better now than they were before, all the same everytime you get a "have you seen this person" its a grainy pixelated flat image from CCTV that could easily be one of thousands of people.
Imagine your crying grandson who caused a traffic accident in Mexico and the police planted drugs in his car and now he needs money to pay them off. He is in pain and probably has a concussion (explanation why he can't remember what you are asking), the police is hassling him to get off the phone (time pressure, explanation why the quality of the call is terrible). Will you get hung up on some code word he asked you to memorise years ago and you can't even know where it is anymore? And if you bring it up he just starts crying and tells you that you are his last chance to turn his life around. And you remember when he was a wee little kid and he fell and scraped his knee and you comforted him. Just the thought of pressing him on the code makes you feel like a terrible person. Or not. And then the scammer just finds someone more gullible. Theirs is a number game after all.
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