Are your aircraft rescue firefighters ready? Have your crew members received the training they deserve and require to handle the emergencies that they may encounter at the airport?

In ARFF we always train and ready ourselves for the “big one” that we hope never happens, but minor accidents occur everyday at airports around the world — accidents that appear only in the back sections of newspapers or that air just before a commercial break during the evening news. Yet it's these smaller accidents that will most likely affect those who use our airports.

The public demands highly trained municipal firefighters capable of responding to a wide variety of emergencies in the city; the people who use your airport should be able to rely equally on its ARFF crew. Millions of people pass through the nation's airports each year: More than 80 million in Atlanta, almost 70 million in Chicago, more than 40 million in Houston. The number of people who are counting on ARFF crews is mind-numbing. With that in mind, are you ready?

Leadership roles

Whether you are the chief of a fire department responsible for a small air field or the ARFF training officer at a large airport, preparation is to your advantage. The Federal Aviation Administration requires airport firefighting crews to receive annual live-fire training. While we know we're going to train at least once per year, do we look forward to that training or are our crews dreading the thought?

Some fire departments have used airport fire stations as retirement homes or rest stops. Some departments have a difficult time placing personnel at an airport because the structural firefighters view it as a slow station assignment. Departments routinely use years in service as the criteria for placement at the airport station to make objective assignments that avoid controversy, but such policies risk excluding personnel who want airport duty. Don't overlook people who genuinely want to be involved with airport operations; they're often our best resource. We need seasoned firefighters in these stations, but we also need paramedics. We need personnel who are mentally engaged with their assignment because they'll bring enthusiasm, dedication and new ideas for maintaining and improving the level of protection for airport visitors.

Your airport crew will reflect your views on airport fire protection. From the one-person ARFF crew to the hub requiring four stations, your personnel will approach their required training in accordance with your overall mindset. Your attitude influences and becomes their attitude, and if you're impatient with training, they will be as well.

Because our responsibilities are more focused on the airport, there's time for in-house training. ARFF personnel check and drive the airport on a daily basis, and they keep themselves up-to-date on the 11 basic subject matters, as required by the FAA. They preplan and discuss their emergency duties through tabletop scenarios and walkthroughs of airport buildings. ARFF crews may not be as busy answering normal alarms as some structural stations, but they know the potential for a large disaster is less than three minutes from their station. This is why we must be overly prepared.

Answering the call

Firefighters are trained to react to certain situations; we train and ready ourselves so that we are able to act quickly and efficiently without having to think. Through training exercises we try to take the surprises out of a situation and focus on what's occurring. This in turn sharpens our skills and fine-tunes our ability to perform safely during a real emergency.

In ARFF as with structural firefighting, a chief's main job prior to the incident and for the duration of the shift is to send home to their families the same number of personnel who reported for duty. If we approach our training with the same intensity as a real incident, then we truly are preparing for how we react during the emergency, making it all the more likely that we will mitigate the incident with the least risk to ourselves and to the greatest benefit of victims.

In my career as a firefighter and as an instructor, I have learned four key ingredients that seem to work during training and can be applied directly to almost every emergency that firefighters could possibly encounter.

1. Adapt

   As humans we have to adapt to everyday changes. Whether it's cold outside or we are placed in a difficult situation on a response, we learn to adapt.

2. Improvise

   Firefighters have to come up with ideas quickly; we seldom have time to listen to input and debate from a broad discussion group and must improvise. Of course this may be the answer only in the short term, as we can always come back later to work on improving the initial idea.

3. Overcome

   Firefighters are always overcoming obstacles during emergencies. The reason fire departments exist is because citizens weren't able to overcome certain obstacles in the first place.

4. Modify

   Our last response to a situation is to modify: If our coat doesn't fit we may diet or exercise or take it to a tailor. In any event, we modified the situation handed to us.

In the case of training, we modify it to fit our needs. If your airport could not land a 747, then it would be a waste of time to train and prepare for this type of incident. Spend your time on airport-specific training goals, but keep it in the back of your mind that your airport might be the only choice for that 747. Now we're modifying the rules to fit our plan of action. When you're ready to train, call the facility you plan to train with and set up training scenarios to fit your airport capacity as well as possible future emergencies.

Training elements

Some departments will receive aircraft familiarization only as a side note during their ARFF training because of the limited number of training facilities in the United States and their geographic locations. Some airports have a burn facility on-site and are able to stage live burns when they warrant it.

One clear advantage of having on-site facilities is that they enable more training over time with greater frequency, minimizing the burdens associated with travel to other training facilities. The costs of training aren't limited to the training itself, but include travel, lodging and meals, and personnel-hours away from the airport. These costs are in addition to the costs of tuition, making it difficult to budget for all of the training you might want or need.

Training budgets are usually stretched thin, so plan and receive the most out of every dollar. Design your annual hot drills with your training facility prior to attendance. Work with the training facility coordinator to outline options available to your department.

Some strategies for maximizing the training budget are to seek out group rates on airlines and schedule training during off-peak flight dates. You might also become friendly with an air carrier based at your airport and drop subtle hints.

When you do have to travel greater distances, you will face more long-range logistical planning and the need to work with the training provider to get the maximum benefit from live-fire evolutions. Develop airport-specific training that addresses the exact needs of your personnel and the types of aircraft that frequent your airport. Forge a solid working relationship with mutual aid agencies, airport operations personnel and air traffic controllers, and try to incorporate them into your training.

Change is good, too. If your department attended an ARFF training facility that used propane as its primary training fuel this year, then make the effort next year to seek out a facility that uses a hydrocarbon-based liquid fuel for its live fires. This isn't to say that there's anything wrong with propane, but you owe it to yourself and your personnel to experience the realism of hydrocarbon-based liquid fires in your training scenarios.

Once the training is under way, refine tactics based on evolutions. Have a game plan and work on these tactics during your live-fire training. Training is the proving ground for how we want the situation to be resolved, the time when mistakes can be made and corrected without costing a life or damaging property. Training as if you're in an actual incident means staying mindful of your safety rules and putting them in effect during evolutions, even to the extent of having a rapid intervention team in place so that their duties become second nature, allowing them to deploy more rapidly and effectively during an actual emergency.

Once your department has completed its annual live-fire training, sit down to meet with personnel and review the positives and negatives. Critique the training just like after an emergency response. Now is also the time to start thinking about next year's annual burns and how to improve and tailor them your needs.

You also should provide avenues of training other than annual hot drills. Command and control and other advanced ARFF courses offer expanded scenarios that will help you implement the command structure during an emergency. Personnel need to be exposed to ARFF ideas, tactics and strategies other than those used at their airport. Conferences are an excellent way for personnel to meet other people in the business and talk shop. This exchange of ideas can facilitate growth and help you to learn of other options for training that are available to your department.

Specialized training

Not every emergency at the airport involves fire. I have been to some airports where the construction seems to never end, and with this type of construction there's always the possibility for trench rescue. Aircraft maintenance hangars are not small buildings by any means; here is a chance to procure some high-angle rescue training for personnel.

Large airports can go through a million gallons of fuel a day. If your airport has a fuel farm, find a training facility where you can combat fuel farm fires or loading terminal fires. The use of weapons of mass destruction against airports also stands as a future threat. We must prepare and train our airport crews in their initial response to this type of terrorism. Interior aircraft fires are rare and easy to ignore during training, but if our preparation has been lacking in this area, the scene may disintegrate into total chaos.

Different scenarios involving initial attack with ARFF apparatus and the deployment of hoseline teams to establish corridors and initiate interior attack during annual live-fire training are a must. ARFF driver/operators are not given enough opportunities to discharge dry chemical or foam. We practice it enough in theory, but when the time comes to use these agents during a real emergency, having actually performed this task in training could be the difference between success and failure.

A response to an actual emergency isn't the time to ask, “Are we prepared?” or to think, “We've never had an emergency like this before.” The specifics of each incident are enough to think about; the basics should be rote.

How do we prepare?

Have we planned for every possible emergency that could occur at our airport? There still stands a chance that we may have overlooked one type of disaster, but if our preplanning was broad it may be similar to one that we can handle.

Did we set enough money aside in the budget to properly train our personnel to the level the public has come to expect from its fire department? Was our training worthwhile to our overall mission? We need to set goals for our training and evaluate them constantly.

Was our organization up to the task at hand of providing rescue for our customers who use the airport that we protect? Did we provide a safe environment for our personnel so we can send them home to their families the next day? The ARFF personnel who work at the airport are valuable resources. We need to use them wisely, and in turn they will produce the best results for the common goal at the airport.

What is our working relationship with mutual aid companies who will respond to a mass-casualty incident at the airport? Do we get along with the airport operations people? How about our friends in the tower? We know some of our larger airports are going to experience the largest aircraft in the world soon, but smaller airports must consider the possibility of unscheduled emergency landings.

Your airport might be their only hope, so remember adapt, improvise and overcome or modify the situation to produce the correct outcome in this situation. Remember to keep asking yourself, “Are we ready?”

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A paid firefighter with the College Station (Texas) Fire Department since 1985, Paul Wayne Powell has been in charge of the agency's ARFF training since 2001. He is the lead ARFF instructor with TEEX/ESTI and has helped to train more than 100 Houston firefighters in the discipline.

What the Future Holds

As you read this, Airbus is producing the largest airliner in the world.

The Airbus 380 will be able to hold more than 555 passengers. That's actually the small version, since the airline companies that purchase the 380 could push this number closer to the 800 passenger range, depending on seating configuration. A passenger load of this size will strain the ability of an ARFF crew to help evacuation of the aircraft and could monopolize the crew's efforts to the exclusion of other mitigation tactics.

The aircraft has three decks: the lower is for cargo, and the upper two are for passengers. The door sill height with the landing gear in the down and locked position is 26.5 feet; compare this to the Boeing 747, where the door sill height is right at 16 feet in the gear down and locked position.

The Airbus 380 even has a special new composite and aluminum combination skin that resists burn-through during a fire on the fuselage, offering protection for up to seven minutes. For ARFF crews, this means greater difficulty penetrating and forcing entry on the aircraft, and more intense fires to combat inside the aircraft itself. An aircraft of this size will carry a fuel load in the neighborhood of 85,000 gallons, more than 20,000 gallons than the 747.

Not to be outdone, Boeing plans to deliver the new 787, a smaller wide-body designed to carry more passengers with greater economy. This means, essentially, more passengers in a larger version of a 737.

The Airbus 380 and Boeing 787 will change the tactics and strategies at some of our larger airports in the United States. With airline travel at or near pre-9/11 numbers, our roles and responsibilities will only increase.