Toby,
in response to your somewhat daft and naiive belief that this runway incursion was not such a big deal I would like to take you back, way way back, to a little place called Tenerife in the Canary Islands, where in 1977 the world's worst airline disaster occurred because of a runway incursion. 683 people were killed when two 747's collided on the runway because of human error. Same as in this case, except we had a vehicle and an aircraft occupying the same active runway.
Given that a large laden aircraft, weighing 450 tonnes travelling at V1 takes a kilometre to stop in a RTO, the significance of any runway incursion can't be under estimated. And given that most runway incursions are caused by ignorance, geographic disorientation or communication errors it means at least one of those parties on the runway didn't even know the other one existed. So merely having controllers in the tower with surface movement radar is no guarantee of safety if an aircraft has commenced the takeoff roll.
Most vehicles on the airfield do not have tower comms as they are not required to operate outside the marked apron roads in the movement area, so even if the controllers spot an incursion, or a potential one on the SMR, there may be no way of alerting the offending driver. So any breach of the runway or taxiway can kill hundreds of people. So there is no such thing as a minor incursion. Every single incursion gets the full ATSB broom up the **** investigation because history shows on numerous occaisions that runway incursions are lethal.
And I'm sorry for calling you Toby, but goddam dammit you look so much like that guy in the West Wing!
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