Hacker News Reader

Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

Over a long period of time, Southwest had been involved in a number of crazy accidents on the west coast, especially

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southwest_Airlines_Flight_1455

which skidded off the end of the runway and almost hit a gas station. It could have been a scene out of a Hollywood movie right in Burbank, CA.

They shut down the gas station and installed this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineered_materials_arrestor_...

funny enough the first person to use that was baseball player and steroid junkie Alex Rodriguez who had some trouble landing his private plane.

Note the high accident count w/ Southwest is largely because Southwest is a big airline and has so many flights. Southwest used to be a David but now it is just another Goliath.

View on HN

That's an interesting accident, but you editorialized a bit too much, and there wasn't a Southwest policy that was the issue. Southwest has more accidents on the west coast because 1) they serve that area and 2) smaller, urban airports have shorter runways that are next to cities.

lol "steroid junkie."

Somewhat off-topic but still HN-relevant I think: PEDs aren't magic (still requires an absolutely massive amount of work to realize the benefits) and while I have no numbers to back it up, I'd wager usage is prevalent in most professional competitions. For pros, it's not just a game. It's a livelihood and I can't exactly fault them for doing what it takes to reach the top. I'm certainly not surprised or judgemental when they do.

You are right about that.

Steroids are not "an easy way out", but rather a way for serious athletes to achieve superhuman performance.

Every so often there is some suggestion that a new generation of muscle-building drugs might work without exercise but I find it hard to believe because I'm sure the stimulation of using your muscle provides cues to the cells how to grow to be effective and that if you produced hypertrophy some other way you'd get different results.

In 2018, another Southwest flight used that same EMAS after overrunning the runway yet again, if you can believe it.

https://aviation-safety.net/wikibase/wiki.php?id=219098

For what it’s worth, Burbank actually has a really short runway.

That's one reason why I said "West Coast"; Southern California has a number of airports with short runways, too few runways (San Diego) and highly crowded airspace combining professional pilots flying large planes and rich jerks flying smaller planes who like to argue with air traffic controllers.

See

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wayne_Airport#Accidents_a...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com