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1. haunte+t[view] [source] 2025-11-04 23:14:16
>>jnsaff+(OP)
Video of the crash, left (?) engine was already engulfed in flames while taking off

https://x.com/BNONews/status/1985845907191889930

https://xcancel.com/BNONews/status/1985845907191889930

Edit: just the mp4 https://video.twimg.com/ext_tw_video/1985845862409334784/pu/...

There is an incredible amount of ground damage! Just wow, this is very bad https://files.catbox.moe/3303ob.jpg

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2. justsi+o2[view] [source] 2025-11-04 23:29:01
>>haunte+t
The damage on the ground is scary to look at. I think the only silver lining here is that it was "just" a sparser industrial area and there weren't any homes. I'm really curious about what the investigation will reveal in a few months. This doesn't look like a "regular" engine fire from a bird strike or so, you would normally expect the flames to come out the back and not over the wing. And at least in theory the MD-11 should be flyable with just two engines, although flames on a wing is probably "really really bad" just by itself already. Too early to speculate about what happened though.
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3. JCM9+Z61[view] [source] 2025-11-05 09:57:00
>>justsi+o2
Zoning guidance generally prohibits land use near an airport that has a high density of people, precisely to limit casualties during an event like this. Industrial would be permitted while residential and commercial use is not.

Scarily there are communities that have ignored such logic and permitted dense residential development right next to an airport.

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4. potato+3p1[view] [source] 2025-11-05 12:57:29
>>JCM9+Z61
You can always come up with some pretext to justify things by ignoring the other side of the equation.

How many lives do the man hours spent commuting, or toiling away to afford higher rents waste?

IDK how the math pencils out, but an attempt ought to be made before drawing conclusions.

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5. Retric+PD1[view] [source] 2025-11-05 14:34:28
>>potato+3p1
None? Nobody puts airports inside city centers and metro areas don’t just have dense urban housing. The common solution in many land strapped cities is for airports to rout aircraft over water often by building airports on reclaimed land.

What generally gets areas in trouble is locations that used to be a good get worse as aircraft get larger and the surroundings get built up. The solution is to send larger airplanes to a new airport, but it’s not free and there’s no clear line when things get unacceptably dangerous.

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6. ilamon+UO2[view] [source] 2025-11-05 20:50:18
>>Retric+PD1
> Nobody puts airports inside city centers

Taipei Songshan, Boston Logan and the old Hong Kong Kai Tak to name a few.

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7. Retric+oS2[view] [source] 2025-11-05 21:06:11
>>ilamon+UO2
Boston Logan is surrounded by water to the point only one end of a single runway isn’t aimed directly at water soon crosses water. The city center requires crossing a bridge. Taipei is a little worse but its only runway is going next to a river here and aimed at a park on each side.

Hong Kong Kai Take would be a solid example except it closed in 1998 because of how the city grew. Look at maps from 1950 and it doesn’t look like a bad location for a small airport.

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8. ilamon+ip3[view] [source] 2025-11-06 00:48:51
>>Retric+oS2
> The city center requires crossing a bridge.

It actually requires using tunnels or a boat. I used to drive a cab and the I93 + Callahan/Sumner tunnel route was hellish. The Big Dig helped a lot, although sometimes that can get pretty backed up too.

> Look at maps from 1950 and it doesn’t look like a bad location for a small airport.

Generally, airports that are close to major urban centers were developed prior to 1950, including all 3 examples named. Songshan was opened during Taiwan's colonial period as the “Matsuyama Airdrome” serving Japanese military flights (https://www.sups.tp.edu.tw/tsa/en/1-1.htm).

For bigger cities with these old central airports, larger airports were opened later in many cases. I don't think that will ever happen in Boston, although satellite airports in neighboring states like "Manchester-Boston" or TF Greene in Rhode Island try pretty hard.

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