This was one of the most bizarre takeoff accidents I have ever seen... will be interesting to learn exactly what happened.

This sounds like the incident someone reported in the General forum. I understood that a motorist was seriously hurt. Not heard the latest news. There is a risk of this type of accident happening all the time aircraft operate in & over built-up areas with roads running past the airport boundaries & runway thresholds. There's obviously not much point in having an airport with no access roads so this will continue. No barrier could possibly prevent every foreseeable situation. The fact that this sort of thing is extremely rare says something for the safety of aircraft operations all over the world. IMHO

This makes me wonder about the proposed developments at my local airport. They want to update it from  the bustling little GA airport that it's been for as long as I can remember to handle medium range jets. Sounds much like the sort of traffic that TEB handles. This involves realigning the main runway which takes it right over a crowded & heavily populated residential area at the southwest end - right into the prevailing wind. The other end passes right across the main road.

Ya I was listening to that incident on the radio yesterday morning.  The crew refused de-ice?  Isnt that illegal?  I mean, its not the first time an aircraft crashed because it wasnt deiced properly...  ???  Was reading this article about an F-28 that crashed 15 years ago due to refusal of de-ice, because the pilot thought the APU was snagged (it was flagged by a mechanic), and they already had engines running... and they chose not to shut down the engines because of that for the de-ice process.  Would have thought by now they would have made it law or something  ???

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Saw the advert myself in Flight International last week. Looks like the council are wanting to make money from the site either through commercial revenue or selling to a developer. I think the problem over here is everybody wants a regional this, a regional that, without realising that places like the US and Australia has them because they are so bl**dy big! Why does Shoreham need a larger runway? Southampton's a hour or so away and so is Gatwick. If some one's that desparate they should get a helicopter. All I can say is local planners will be the death of GA in the UK, be it by filling the sky with controlled airspace or by building on all our airfields...

Charlie

Rocketbird: no, it's not illegal to decline de-ice; the responsibility for deciding  the plane is airworthy rests with the PIC. It wouldn't be practical, even for a charter  or private flight, to have somebody with the FAA or the airport check for ice or frost on the wings of every bird before it departs. Sometimes. when there's a long delay, planes get de-iced then get iced up again before they're in position for takeoff!.

Hagar: Your mention of the Munich crash got me dusting off one of my favorite (but a little morbid) books:' Air Disasters' byStanley Stewart. According to that book, BEA Ambassador G-ALZU crashed not only due to ice (snow, really) on the wings, but due to slush on the runway. It was a classic case of two factors, each not a threat by itself, combining to create a disaster. If they had more lift, the slush might not have have messed things up; if there were no slush, the ice wouldn't have been much of a problem either. In fact, skimming thru this again, I see that the investigators at the time leaned towards the slush as the primary cause of the accident:  somewhere around reaching V1, the nosewheel re-enterd the slush, slowing her down enough so that she barely rotated by the end of the runway, and even then she wasn't ready to fly;the nosewheel came 'unstuck' but  the tail was dragging on the ground. They got the gear up, but she was probably just in ground effect (barely) at that point, and veered off towards a house, skimming the ground. The rest you know about- awful.
The captain, who survived, was sort of dragged across the coals, but in the end he was exonerated. The good news is that the effect of snow on takeoff performance was taken more seriously after that- airport personnel had measured the slush that day, but apparently it was within accepted limits for that time.

The long and short of it is that there's absolutely no need for the bigger runway, its probably just some local planners getting excited and thinking they could make money out of the airport, and keeping the "plane-spotters" (in their view) who want the airfield to stay open happy. But they don't get the point (most of them probably don't understand the concept of GA)...