it is amazing to see those pictures of that plane and that nobody was injured in any serious way. literally. the front nose gear of that plane ripped off. the nose cone rip off and cockpit of that plane hanging out over that berm overflushing the bay and any more force and it could have been much much worse. everybody was able to escape out the right side of that plane. as fire engines and emergency crews attacked the left side of that plane because of a fuel leak. as much as a thousand gallons of fuel may have leaked out of there. port authority saying they were experiencing a leak of a gallon a minute and able to finally contain it and now they are trying to figure out how to move that plane out so they can get it off the runway and get runway 13 open again. a little bit of good news as well for travelers here. the entire airport was shut down until 7:00 p.m. tonight. but now it appears that the outbound runway is now open
the airport is closed. the airport is closed. call 100, say again. tower, we have an aircraft off 31. please advise crash rescue laguardia airport is closed at this time. the pilots in that communication, they had no choice but to turn a different direction to go land at jfk maybe, maybe newark. ultimately it is in general to land when the runway is open in bad conditions. you re a pilot. how difficult is it for you to know precisely whether it s safe to land? well, there is a lot of instrumentation at an airport that give you up-to-date real-time data what is going on the wind conditions the visibility the height of the ceiling, and a key factor is the braking action on the runway. the one thing that is required to get that information is a truck needs to roll down the runway with a sensor behind it to determine the braking action.
doing what is called friction test and literally take out equipment approved by the faa and see if they drive a van up and down the airport if they are getting friction which you have to have when your tires touch the runway and it is the airport, not the air traffic controller or the federal aviation administration that makes the decision whether or not to close the airport and then the final piece of the puzzle is that mysterious tail wind. did they land with a tail wind? and that would have fawn in with the pilot s decision making. three factors here. air traffic control, the airport, and the pilot, all pilots all come in to play in the decision to land. mary thanks for breaking it down for us and we will talk to you throughout the next hour half or so. chilling new video coming up capturing the chaotic moment after the boston marathon bombing. testimony today from survivors on the witness stand. a live report from day two of the boston bombing trial.
a weather-related incident? i clearly think it was a weather-related incident but, you know there s a lot that goes into a weather-related incident. the faa has been studying this for years. sadly, they spend a lot of time studying. a couple of things that airports have to do. one is airports have to relay to the air traffic control. the airport s job to tell the tower the friction condition of the runway. the airport has to go out and measure whether the airport runways have friction meaning when those tires touch down that they will have some contact with the runway. in other words friction in normal operation, that s what you want. there are machines and gizmos if you will tools they can use to do that and they provide that information. as to whether the runways are slippery that is breaking action. the airport gets that from the reports of previous pilots. so nrdsin other words if a 757 landed before before that and the pilot said i got very little
runway when you apply the brakes how fast you try to come in as slowly as possible. but there is lots of advisories out there from the government and other pilot organizations with about whether or not to use the thrust so a lot of questions come into play. i want to see what is happening at the airport right now. you mentioned, miguel outbound flights were supposed to be getting going again. is that indeed, the case? reporter: they are starting to creep out of this airport. on the boards behind me here at the american terminal, they are starting to get onto the boards. after 2:00 p.m. eastern time, they are starting to schedule them to get out of laguardia. all inbound flights still closed. on the runways i can tell you we have spoken to two pilots. lorenzo, our producer have spoken to two pilots flying smaller planes regional jets and came in two hours before this incident happened and that pilot