The Firehouse

They are usually forgotten, as they tend to see a lot less action than non-airport bound firefighters, but boy, do they have cool equipment to play with! Airport fire departments have some very tight performance parameters, basically, because when a huge piece of aluminium, titanium, passengers and fuel crashes and ignites on or near a runway, every second counts. That’s the reason this 40-ton baby accelerates from 0 to 80 Km/h (50mph) in around 25 seconds. In proportion to weight, this is faster than a 1997 McLaren F1, which hits 100 Km/h (60mph) in 3.3 seconds! And this is what it looks like:

The Rosenbauer Panther 8×8 MA5 airport and rescue firefighting vehicle. Sporting a 1000 hp engine (yes, that is not a typo), it carries 12.5 tons of water, 1.5 tons of foam liquid, and up to 1 ton of NP powder. Full specs here. Up to three monitors (two mounted at the front, one top) give it a range from 25 meters up to 85 meters, all controlled from the cabin with joysticks and cameras. At 11 bars of pressure, the top monitor can empty the water tank in two minutes. The cabin controls look like something out of Star Wars:

Note the complex MFD control system for the hydraulics – so much for turning a wheel and having water come out a hose, right? While I did part-time work at Southend Airport, I was able to ride and operate a much smaller, much simpler, but equally fun Carmichael truck. Will post a pic when I find it and scan it (film rolls back then, the only thing digital in cameras was your finger).

Airport security is doomed to fail in preventing terrorist attacks. Unless they want us to fly naked and possibly even then get an X-ray and proctologist exam before boarding, there is no way they can prevent nasty things happening.

We are currently forced into placing our toiletries (gels, perfume, shaving cream) into a small clear plastic bag, presumably because the small clear plastic bag will contain the brutal force of a liquid explosive going off inside it. Actually, the explosion would not be that spectacular, as The Register explained.

I happened to travel to London from Barcelona on the 20th, but on flight BA477, the early morning one – had I picked the later flight at 11 AM, BA478, I would have been on one of the aircraft contaminated with Polonium-210. On the way back that afternoon, we flew out of Gatwick, as the Heathrow flight was full…which happened to be BA479, also a contaminated flight. Near-miss on both trips.
Polonium-210 is a highly radioactive substance, but which emits alpha particles, which travel slow and cannot even penetrate the human skin. This makes it very difficult to detect, and since a dose of 1 milligram can kill a human, it is very easy to conceal and transport many lethal doses, for example, inside a pen. Delivery to a victim can be through water or food, inhalation, or an open wound. It’s unlikely a terrorist would start placing little pellets of Polonium in the food trays delivered during a flight, but he could empty one of the sub-100cc bottles he conveniently carried onboard in the clear plastic bag in the lavatory, a place likely visited by most passengers during a long flight.

The next obvious question is – how easy is it to obtain Polonium-210? Very easy, actually. Although it is a byproduct of nuclear reactors, United Nuclear sells license-exempt quantities to the general public. How easy is it to obtain Polonium-210 in toxic quantities? Not that easy – a lot of hype has been passed around the media regarding United Nuclear, but as their special note states, you would need to spend $1 million and order 15.000 samples to have a toxic amount of the stuff. Samples ordered are produced on demand at a reactor in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

We should not worry too much about getting a whiff of Polonium-210 on our next flight, but we should raise against the draconian “security” measures imposed by panels of would-be experts. We are not realizing that the terrorists are winning one battle, which is to make us live in fear and paranoia, when the actual chances of dying in a terrorist attack are smaller than tripping over on the sidewalk and fatally hitting your head on the concrete. Maybe we should outlaw sidewalks…

While reading a post by Scoble on WiFi being present at the SF Giants stadium, I came across seatguru.com, a site dedicated to everything related with airliner seats. You can search by airline, then load seating maps for most of their fleets, and the best part – they have color-coded the seats, so you can quickly see what seats are good, and which ones can make you feel like spam-in-a-can (movie quote, The Right Stuff).

Additionally, there is some good info on amenities, laptop power arrangements and other tidbits. In all, very recommended for frequent travellers.

My personal recommendation is to grab the seats on the emergency exits, which by law have extra room between them and the seats in front. This can give you a very comfortable extra legroom if you travel coach. In order to be able to seat next to the emergency exits, you have to assume extra duties as a passenger, mainly being able to understand instructions given to you by flight attendants (i.e. “get out!”), and lift weights of up to 50lb.

The flight attendant will brief you on these duties, and let you know that if you don’t feel like taking the responsibility, you can move to another seat. When they ask you under which two circumstances you should not open the door, the answers are: a) if you are not instructed by a flight crew member to do so, and b) when there is a fire on your side of the aircraft. Answer them correctly and you may get an extra icecream during the flight (true story!)

This was seen on a Boeing 767 while en route from Las Vegas to Atlanta, the flight being operated by Delta. Apparently, many people were having problems with their purchased movies, and so the crew decided to reset the system, provoking a nicely familiar sight.

Now we could all start making jokes about nmapping the plane, or trying to run Asterisk off a USB drive plugged into the management console, which by the way was accessible to anyone who wandered to the toilet and happened to look left. It had a nice big “Reset all” button too, two USB ports, and a gigabit etherenet RJ45. I just hope they don’t run a kernel with some remote_crash_plane() buffer overflow exploit…

Last week I had to go to Romania for a meeting with a team of coders, landing at Cluj-Napoca on Tuesday. Scheduled to return on Wednesday, I duly turned up at the airport by 08:00, joining the long line leading to the security checkpoint. Wait. A long line? We’re talking about an airport with a single runway, one transfer bus (you could actually walk the 50 yards to the plane, but hey, if they have it they might aswell put it to some use!), about a dozen flights a day, all of them small turboprops with a capacity for around 60 people – which usually fly half empty.

So, what was the reason for the holdup? An overzealous security guard, who stared at each bag on the x-ray monitor while squinting his eyes as if it would bring more detail to the picture. After the long radioactive scrutiny, he would open the bags, shout a few things to their owners, and sometimes pull things out of them. Dangerous stuff such as sticks of SEMTEX I though.

When my turn arrived, some forty minutes later, I was rather curious apart from annoyed at what was captivating this guard. I should have guessed. Romania must have a healthy black market for….spray deodorants. My tiny Nivea sample spray tin was also taken, with a bad boy stare from the guard.

According to international safety regulations, flammable sprays are not allowed on board aircraft (albeit agencies such as the TSA allow toiletries in small quantities), just as dangerous chemicals, explosives, live ammunition, and a whole bunch of other nasty stuff. This guy had the right to take away my little piece of odour-fighting equipment – but was it really necessary to do so? I had almost calmed down, fearing I would miss my connection at Vienna, when I noticed the also tiny duty-free shop, which looked recently refurbished. On a closer look, they were selling…yep, you guessed it – a truckload of flammable products, from large hair sprays ten times larger than my former deodorant, to cologne with a high alcohol content. I could have just bought one and carried on with my world domination plans just as well, but all I wanted was to get to Vienna.

This got me thinking about the recent hubbub about exploding Dell laptops, basically when their batteries vented with flame and smoke, as it is technically defined. Laptop batteries are made of lithium-cobalt, or more recently, lithium-manganese oxide. This type of chemistry is very efficient at holding charge, and making it available at high rates, without damage or aging to the battery. The drawback is that they are very dangerous. A lithium battery can explode violently, sending chemicals and debris out at high speed and causing a lot of damage. They can also vent with flame and smoke, as seen in Dell’s promotional footage. For a great explanation of battery technologies, visit the Battery University.

The TSA officially allows laptops and their batteries in both checked and cabin luggage, so do we have to worry? If you ever find yourself sitting next to a burning laptop on a flight, take this comforting thought with you: there is nothing on the plane that can put out a lithium chemical fire.

Happy flying!