I seem to recall seeing an article that said they were going to put an electric drive into the nose wheels that would achieve the fuel savings without having to clutter the place up with a bunch of driverless tractors.
There's a time and place. That particular fool chose the wrong time and the wrong place. A smart operator would have been concentrating on the job at hand not sending texts to his photographer friends trackside.
And to think I had the heat put on me for doing the same thing while driving a train. Like the pilots, I knew when it was safe to 'be distracted'. And don't anybody for one second think that I'm comparing my skills to that of a commercial pilot.
Same deal with rail fans. We can be the extra eyes and ears contributing to security. We would be the first ones to notice anything wrong but more often than not are treated as a nuisance.
I suspect this kind of stuff up is more common than we know. Anecdotal stories of similar events have been around for years. I live in Melbourne but I sure as aint in Florida.
"Photoshop: Eagle-eyed observers claim the Iranian jet was superimposed upon a generic picture of Mount Damavand"
How fucking eagle eyed would you need to be to see that the cloud formation is identical in both shots. What's the odds ?