Pause the video at 13 sec. That firetruck is awfully intact for something that allegedly got hit at high speed. Basically just a bunch of top side sheetmetal damage (concentrated to the rear, obviously). In any case it didn't even get sent hard enough to screw up the cab exterior. And on the flip side, if you keep cranking the speed up you start getting to where the plane starts looking too suspiciously intact. There's just not much room to work backwards from the apparent results and get a high difference in speed or get very high initial speeds (100 onto 75 or whatever). If the plane was going fast the truck had to be going fast too or there'd be more carnage. But if they were both going fast you'd expect more damage from the after the fact barrel roll and the plane and truck to be a little farther apart in distance.

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PunchyHamster an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Fire truck is filled to brim with gear and doesn't care all that much about weight, plane is the opposite of that, lightness is money, so it makes sense fire truck looks better after crash than plane

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whycome 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Where’s the video you’re referring to?

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HEFF17eaYAA_sgq?format=jpg

I can’t tell what’s the truck and what’s the remains of the plane in this pic.

Another wider angle:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HEFDcS4bwAA8uu7?format=png&name=...

There’s no way this scene happens from a plane colliding with a truck at 24mph.

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cucumber3732842 8 hours ago | parent [-]

I'm talking about the headline video from TFA.

The back of a firetruck is not a working implement like a dump truck is nor is it sufficiently strong for mounting a crane or man bucket like utility bodies often are It's a bunch of sheetmetal boxes to hold stuff and cover stuff and there's a water tank back there somewhere. In the middle down low some pumps are buried. Basically don't think of it as being any more structural than a box truck body because it's not. All that stuff got shredded, obviously, since they're only really meant to bear their own weight and were subject to all the truck tossing forces here. Beyond that the truck is in pretty good shape. It's not uncommon for a good "off the highway and into the ditch" crash to rip tandems off, twist frames, etc. None of that has happened here. The plane is pretty rough, but that's expected. They are 100% tin cans. Ground equipment moving at idle speeds will absolutely shred them before the operator even feels resistance. A goose hit square on the leading edge of a small jet's wing will put a massive dent in (and apply red paint, lol).

24 sounds about right for a closing speed for plane onto truck. Whatever the baseline speed of the truck was cannot have been that high or the truck would be absolutely shredded from the barrel roll and as it stand the cab is barely pushed in.

	▲	whycome 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The article dropped the speed claim. The last recorded ground speed data of 24mph also shows a wildly different heading (going from 30deg ish to 170ish). So it probably happened after the collision and was part of its deceleration. As far as I know, the truck would have been crossing the runway so the effective speed perpendicular to the plane would be zero except for directional shear I guess.