The Friedman Files

Here are a couple of the photos from the crash.  They show the windows of an American Airlines high speed tug (called a Goldhofer) damaged this afternoon at DFW.   The two people inside the tug were taken to hospitals – treated for their injuries and then released

Sources tell us the two people inside the tug were trying to re-enact an incident that happened earlier this spring – when workers driving one of the tugs were unable to stop short of a runway and pulled a giant Boeing 777 into the path of an incoming flight.  Controllers say the incoming plane was just feet away hitting the plane under tow.

After that incident, workers complained the tug’s brakes hadn’t worked well enough to stop the heavy 777.  Today, an American airlines employee and an employee of the company that built the tug were apparently testing that notion when today’s incident happened.  Somehow when they stopped, the tug was bounced around throwing them into the glass. 

American bought the tugs to save fuel.  They can pull planes across runways at high speed without running the plane’s engines.  As we first reported in May, the tugs have come under fire from air traffic controllers who’ve complained that they can’t see them when they’re used to pull un-lit planes (with the plane’s engines off) across runways in the dark at DFW.

Airport officials at DFW actually banned them from the runways after the near-miss which happened in daylight hours in April.  And, airport safety officials had written to the airline for months before that about the night-time lighting concerns.