The Friedman Files

We drive by them every day but we hardly notice them.  In tonight’s 10pm newscast we look at roadside guardrails and how they are now being challenged by bigger heavier SUV’s and pick-up trucks.  In some cases the rails can actually make things worse when bigger heavier vehicles come in contact with them.

For this story we headed south to the Texas Traffic Institute at Texas A&M University, which has done some of the leading guardrail research in the nation.  It’s a neat place to visit.  It feels a little like the lot at a movie studio.  In fact, when we were there we got to witness a test of a bridge railing — cameras rolling as reasearchers slammed a big truck into it at freeway speeds.  Interesting to see in a “laboratory” setting.  Not something you want to see in real life.

The great thing about TTI is that the research they do has real life applications, and people in Texas benefit.   Many of the highway improvements they’ve pioneered get rolled out first on Texas roads.  

They first identified problems with some guardrails more than a decade ago.  They’ve made improvements since, and never stopped.  You’ll see more of their new ideas coming to a highway near you soon.  You’ll drive past — barely noticing.  At least we hope so.  It may be that only crash survivors have a real appreciation for what TTI does for Texas and the country.   Our thanks to Roger Bligh and the team at TTI for sharing their expertise in our story.

It’s not quite a needle in a haystack but it may be close. In a story tonight at 10pm we reveal that the NTSB may expand the search area in Hunt County for a piece that fell off an engine in flight. They may also bring in their own people to search. Finding the part is now crucial to figuring out why parts of the engine came apart in the sky.

The locals have been told to keep their eyes peeled. But people we talked to in the area have their doubts about finding it. After a rainy spring and summer last year the now dead and dried grass is especially long in that area. And as several people told us, the fact that it hasn’t been seen near any of the homes in the area suggests -if it’s out there – its probably deep in the fields or a river bed nearby.

The science of such a search is interesting. The NTSB has used air traffic control data – along with information from the flight data recorder and weather information to estimate “wind drift” to come up with a best guess as to where it the missing piece might be.

Call it a hunch – but somehow I think they’ll find it if they devote more time and resources to looking. Most of the land in the area is relatively untouched – it’s not an area where people typically pass through. So if they’ve identified the right spot it may just be a matter of time and effort. But, as the major landowner in the area told us, anyone coming out to look will need their “mud boots”.

A couple of additional technical notes about the engine beyond what we said in our story. It’s called a CFM 56-3. It’s the most utilized commerical aircraft engine in the world because its used on the 737 – the workhorse of commerical aviation fleets. It’s made by GE (also the parent company of NBC). That engine model has flown upwards of 180 million flight hours. Investigators have never seen a case exactly like this and they want to know what caused it – so it doesn’t happen again.