NYC Aviation Soars Through Drastic Conditions
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NYC Aviation keeps tabs on vital goings-on around the area's airports, and the coverage often starts from passengers' social media updates. NY1's Valarie D'Elia filed the following report. There was no tsunami associated with New York’s quirky quake that had its epicenter near Richmond, Virginia, but there was an instantaneous tidal wave of another sort.
"Non-stop flow on Twitter. It wasn't stopping. I don’t think I’ve seen so many tweets so fast," says Phil Derner, president of NYC Aviation.
NYC Aviation is a grassroots news resource for everything airplanes. Derner went right to work when the quake hit.
"It was pretty wild, so we got on it. We started checking statuses of airports up and down the East Coast to see if there were any delays, and we started reporting that," says Derner.
Derner, who works out of a home office not far from LaGuardia, goes straight to the source for his intelligence.
"We get reports of people on aircraft through social media. They'll say, 'I'm sitting on this plane, we're being held here,' then we start seeing which airports are having issues. We have various resources, often from the FAA," says Derner.
Some of the precautions taken at area airports immediately following the quake included ground stops and control tower evacuations.
"You have a team of people sitting up there in a tower, you want to make sure there's no structural damage or anything like that. You also want to check the runways themselves to make sure there's no warping, there's no cracking or even loose rocks where if a plane runs down the runway, you don't get a rock that gets sucked into an engine or hits a bump, blows a tire, goes off the runway," says Derner.
Especially in an emergency, Derner says, it all goes by the book.
"Whether it's an earthquake or hurricane they know exactly what to do. There is a procedure for everything," says Derner.
For more information, visit NYCaviation.com.