I learned about flying from this, too...

On Feb 6, 6:55 pm, Some Other Guy wrote:
Ken S. Tucker wrote:
More than likely, a superficial runway inspection,
either by the controllers, the pilots or anyone
walking the runway would have noticed that debris
that destroyed the Concorde, and costed a $Billion.

The crash happened at CDG airport, which is the busiest in Europe at over
half a million flights annually. It has four runways:

08L/26R 13,829'
09R/27L 13,780'
08R/26L 8,858'
09L/27R 8,858'

That's about 14 km worth of runway, and there's a flight roughly every 60
seconds. A full walking inspection of just one of those 13,800' runways
would take around 45 minutes, but you'd need to do it every minute or two.
Clearly it wouldn't be practical to insist that the pilots do it since by
the time they've finished, another 40-50 flights would have used the runway.

How about using one of them fella's who's looking at
peoples shoes for bombs, why is that good to do?

Since a shoe inspection guy can't run that fast, you'd need to have
some 20 of them strolling back and forth to ensure constant complete
coverage between each flight.

The debris that did in the Concorde was a thin strip just 3x50cm, which
they probably would have missed anyway since the runways are 150' wide;
more so at the shoulders were presumably your shoe inspectors would be
walking since jetwash isn't the most comfortable thing in the world.
Really you'd need one guy on each side of each runway.

So: 40 shoe inspectors for each 13,800' runway walking back and forth;
80 shoe inspectors total to cover both. We'll discount the 8800' runways
since presumably they won't be in use at the same time as the 13,800' ones.

How about you suggest it to the airport authorities and get back to us
with what they tell you? Or where they tell you to go as might be the case.

First recognize and define the problem.
(The PROBLEM exists, that's proven).

Next we'll solve it. Mr. SOG, I see you're less than
qualified to detail that process, which is a science
and engineering problem, over-all.
Examples, "metal detectors", "optical scanners",
leave the "solution" to the pros. Smarter pilots
need only acknowledge the problem.
Ken