A San Francisco Fire Department spokeswoman said that the agency is still investigating which rig ran over and killed a 16-year-old Asiana Airlines crash survivor, and infrared equipment wouldn’t have had any bearing on the situation.
A two-axle truck is believed to have run over Ye Meng Yuan as it moved to get a better position to spray foam on fire was not equipped with infrared imaging technology now required by federal law.
A fire spokesperson said officials are still probing which vehicle was responsible for the girl’s death after Asiana Airlines Flight 214 crashed July 6.
The first trucks to respond were foam-throwing trucks, but it is unlikely Yuan was killed during that initial response.
All four foam-spraying rigs at San Francisco International Airport have infrared systems to identify hot spots on planes that need to be cooled down, and all four were working.
San Francisco’s airport fire divisions are equipped with four Aircraft Rescue Firefighting Vehicles — the massive foam throwers that usually respond first to crashes or fires — as well as two engines, one truck, two paramedic units, four watercraft and a command unit.
There has been confusion about the difference between what’s known as Driver’s Enhanced Vision systems, or DEV, which describes many different systems aimed at helping fire truck drivers, and Forward Looking InfraRed, which is one particular type of DEV.
The airport is still in the process of installing two other types of DEV systems. One feeds a library of aircraft models and their layouts to computers in fire engines, so that when they pull up to an aircraft they have its layout available. The second is a mapping system that would allow rescuers obscured by fog or smoke to find their way around the runway.
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