Who’s this McClaren guy? Whats going on? :confused:

Not a chance dude.

The front bucket (not incl arms) on a 3CX wouldn’t weigh a ton (infact, the max lifting weight is around a ton on the front end), and its coping with much, much heavier loads than a plough.

Nah, just generalisation. It would be very easy to do. It isn’t much of a grand theory either – its more a simple ad-hoc fix solution that no-one seems to have bothered with.

OK, some may have winches, but many/most won’t. Leave the winches on and put ploughs on the ones that don’t.

It would also be the kinda thing that the maintenance engineers will jump at – a chance to build yer own doo-hickey equipped with widgets 😀 – Heck, the fire crews would probably want do it to offset the tedium of sitting on their arses during a normal shift.

You ever seen the blade on a mini digger? Since the blade isn’t actually having to lift anything besides its own weight, the moving mechanism won’t be much addition in terms of weight. Proportionally, its even less than a mini digger as that blade can be used for stability.

As you point out, the issue will be visibility, but for the headlights, the driver’s eye line is too far above the ground to be an issue. Thus, it probably would require moving the headlights to the roof-line or better addition of more worklights to the roof-line and leave the headlights where they are – which is no bad thing anyway, you can never have enough light.

And have airports closed because of a few mil of snow? :confused:

I’m sure big airports have dedicated ploughs, but smaller ones can’t always afford to duplicate equipment when a common solution could do the job of both.

Airport Fire Service Appliances need, as Andrew has said, off-road capability, and may have to, god forbid, drive through wreckage to get to an aircraft, and they may have to go ‘across country’. You only need to see the video of that SAS Dash 8 with a landing gear collapse and see one of the fire engines bound across the grass – it couldnt do that with a plough on the front. I shall try and find the video.

Fireman will never have a ‘normal’ shift where they do nothing at all.

EDIT: video http://nyhederne.tv2.dk/article.php/id-8216610.html?forside

I ebay’d the crap that I found in my keyboard….

OMG. A very unusual incident!

Kind of ironic how in Quito, there is an Airbus A340-600 stuck with the nose pointing down, and in Toulouse, there is an Airbus A340-600 stuck with its nose in the air!

One of the ATRs popped into Manchester today and was on a stand often used by Aurigny – so I’m assuming G-CDFF.

furthermore if this were your table who would you invite to sit round it?

Would there actually be space to sit around it? – I mean what with the millions of power cables an’ all??

Really cool shots Lance. I’m looking forward to this ‘diversion season’ – should yield some interesting ‘results’! I wonder why the PIA was over by the cargo centre? Was the terminal pretty full?