Aviation Seminar Aircraft Rescue and Fire Fighting Strategies and Tactics 2016 1109

thank you all for coming to our final seminar in our evening series here tonight I'm really excited we have Todd Van Lu I who as you probably have gathered is an airport firefighter over at BWI is gonna be talking about airport firefighting tactics and strategies to see anything so thank you for coming up tonight on problems thank you thank you all for coming to our program this evening hello my name is driver operator Todd van Lew up at BWI Airport as you can tell I've been there for 10 years it'll be about 10 years in April but so I'm gonna just talk a little bit about is a basic how you go about becoming one some of the equipment and tools we use at the airport and answer any questions you you all might have I'm just gonna take a quick poll most lead pilots tonight pilot not yet but on the other side of the windscreen hopefully we'll never meet well I'll start off with and a lot of the people asked you know how come you know and you guys have a lot more knowledge but the reason that some airports do have a professional Fire Department on scene or on site is the airports that comply with the title the the federal title 49 CFR are required to have emergency response equipment personnel to accommodate the longest air carrier aircraft that has five scheduled departures and arrivals daily so that's the key the five scheduled arrivals and departures BWI I'm sure you've seen the world Airlines they have 747s they're British air has a seven in new one of the new 787 s it comes in but it's only one per day the world airlines are not a daily regularly scheduled arrivals and departures so at BWI we're a Class B and I'll go into this or a low C airport so what FA divides it into different indexes of airports a Class A Airport is any the planes are less than 90 feet which we similar to like a CRJ a regional jet a Class B nine to 126 foot in length which is a 737 or dc9 a/c is 129 to 150 126 to 159 which is roughly about a 757 so that's what BWI if we have a lot like if Delta them start picking up their 757s we go back we bump up into a see if they're not flying we're back into a B so we bounce upon there we keep the the fire department equipment there for a Class C at any one time and then as you get larger Class D Airport goes up to 200 foot in length that's like a dc-10 or 767 and lastly you've got it Class E which is anything over 200 which were 747 the new a380s the the bigger planes with that there's three groups of people that are involved in any kind of airplane that the FA is is considered part of the airplane emergency forces the flight deck crew second of the flight attendants and third is the RF personnel so the first two are the most important and I'll go into a little bit why but the flight deck crew is responsible for a getting around the ground on our wheels the flight attendants are the ones that have to evacuate the aircraft most aircraft or can be evacuated with a full load in under 90 seconds they test them on new air airplanes and if you want you go to youtube and you can actually watch the test where they take people and they put them in the airplane and they sit there and watch them come out all the slides and then finally is the RF personnel but if there is any kind of emergency the final call as to evacuate that aircraft comes from the flight deck personnel we could recommend it but if the flight deck crew does not want to evacuate the aircraft it has it's it's it's the pilots airplane and he has the final say our job is RF is to create conditions that allow survival to be possible and evacuation and rescue can occur so for example if you have an exterior fire like some of the videos you've seen Las Vegas recently and things like that our job is we call it we we come in and we cut what's called a fire lane where we come in just I don't want to say we're not worried about the aircraft worried about making sure the escape paths from the aircraft or clear fire so if you look at some of those videos and I we could sit here for hours and and go on but like the Las Vegas one was a perfect example the first crash truck there got himself between the fire and the people leaving the airplane so he held that fire back to make sure the people coming out of the tail of the aircraft had it clear at a clear path and if of course the flight crews and the interior cabin crew is disabled we can start evacuation procedures from the outside towards the end I have a little video showing you how we pop doors from the outside it's a little more complicated on those bigger airplanes but we do we do train on that so are we said we cut the fire lanes and make sure everybody our primary is like I said to create a path for evacuation and rescues of crew and passengers second priority is to neutralize it's neutralized the fire or explosion danger so our first priority and some people have said you know how they like the the other part of the plane was burning our first part is to make sure every everybody's out of the airplane that's going to be able to get out of the airplane then we work on extinguishing the fire the fuel spill fire the under under plane fires and things like that and then after that we assist that the passengers with any kind of medical issues or further evacuations that they might have now at BWI to accomplish that we have four of these crash trucks these are our Airport crash trucks we have two of this style and I'll show you there's two of a different style a newer style at any one time we have to have three of them in operation so like tonight I would have loved to have brought one but one of our trucks is down for maintenance so I can't take one of the other ones from the airport but if anybody wants I know it's a long drive but I know where there's always guys 24/7 365 days a year and we don't get many visitors we really like to have visitors so but we have four of those units we also have one fire engine which is similar like you've seen on Ken island or in Easton carries the hose in the water that is staffed with four people the crash trucks are only staffed with a driver so that's what's a little different any of you have any military experience military crash crews have three a driver a crew chief and a firefighter at most I don't say most at a lot of commercial airline airports was used the only driver only and everything can be done with just a driver from the cab I don't have to get out of the cab everything it's a matter of hitting the right buttons in the right sequence and you can flow for more water we have the engine that has four people on it for firefighters their job is to assist with the cutting of the fire lanes so they would pull a hand line help with the shoots help passengers off the chutes their job is pretty much exterior of the aircraft the next is our tower crew which is a ladder tower I'm sure you've seen a big big fire truck ladder on top it goes up and down that's our tower crew their primary responsibility is the ladder the aircraft and get inside the aircraft if possible and assist with evacuating anybody that's injured or incapacitated so we've got the engine crew stays outside the ladder crew goes inside for rescue and last we have two ambulances staffed by paramedics their job is to set up for the any casualties they might have from the aircraft evacuation total minimum staff at BWI to cover all BWI Airport is 16 people so that's that's what we have on shift at any one time now we also run mutual aid to Anne Arundel County Baltimore City Baltimore County so at times like an ambulance might be over in this in there or times or fire trucks or fire engines there have been times where they've called special calls for these units as a chief once told me they said you're not gonna fight a lot of house fires things like that but when you get the call to go to a fire it's going to be something that no one knows how to put out and I've had a couple of them and it's been quite the experience that pretty much they realized when they they've exhausted their possible possibilities they call the airport and we come in with our foam trucks and we do our special little dances with them so any any questions about so far what we have at BWI I'll show you some of the pictures of some of the units and things like that so yes first shift when we work we work a 2472 shift so I work one day on and there's three days off so there's a total of four shifts so at any one time they're depending like today see shift is working I work tomorrow I'm on D shift yeah 7:00 a.m. to 7:00 a.m. so we work 24 hours some days it's a long 24 hours but that day don't they don't happen that's a really good thing yes sir yes yes a lot of times depending on depending on the call it might we might send like if they call for a crash truck a lot of times we'll try to send our engine or fire engine with it just so he's got more people that know how to work with the truck and there's more personnel sometimes if we can't send the engine we might put an extra firefighter on the truck just to help the driver out I went to one Brandon Shores where they didn't have a chance to send the engine so they just took an extra firefighter put him with me and said you two go and take care of this like the the gas truck fire on four not on 895 there's a picture of that I have it in towards the tail end of the lecture it shows the just the picture of that truck and that that actually went with the tower and lat and engine with two that one to help with the point the truck on the airport well if let's say like tonight we had a call-out like that there's and don't call me there's within the regular I think it's if we have to send a notice to the airport ops to the airlines if it's going to be down for a certain amount of time if it's going to be down for like over 48 hours then we have to send out a major note AM and the airport could get berated but that's why we try to keep the the four crash trucks because even if let's say one goes out there's still three crash trucks there and we just steal another operator and we still have our still within index we've and most of the time when these trucks go out for something like that they're gone for an hour - which is similar to training you know like say if the truck had to go for training or something like that but it's not I mean when they call for it it has to be a warranted now like hey we we've got a brush fire we really wanted to see one of your big trucks come drive through a field no it's got to be a and usually by the time they're calling for it it's on the news and we're all watching going yeah who took the last one okay you get this one so but to start out with the airport firefighter first thing you're going to do and it's it's similar and a lot of people surprised we go to Fire Academy so this this is actually an Arundel's Fire Academy where we have six new recruits in in their class right now so what they do is they go to the regular Fire Academy and they're trained just like Anne Arundel County Baltimore County myself I was one of the recruits that was actually trained in house of bwi I started in April and we graduated the shift before Christmas so is eight months of Academy but they'll start out at a regular Fire Academy and like some of these guys that intermingle our recruits with Anne Arundel Kreutz and sometimes Annapolis cities recruits are in there so they're all trained on the same basic firefighter one firefighter two ladders and hoses after that when they graduate that then they come to the airport and then we train them in in what's called ARF which is aircraft rescue firefighting it's a separate course it's specifically all about harp and that's when they get their silvers that's when we start teaching about the flammable liquids the foams and all the special hand lines and equipment we have at the port to get in there with the class that I came in they advertised initially for 10 positions there were 11 hundred applicants so and and and halfway through they brought in a class of paramedic firefighters so that was a total of 15 10 graduated so we lost five and out of those 10 we've lost four more to one went down south to be a firefighter another one decided he would rather be a police officer and two other ones were we lost from injury and line-of-duty injuries so it's hi it's a it's a rough job I've been hurt I've been off for a couple months so you know you're you're playing with dangerous things this is actually our fire training pit up at BWI we are training pitch located right off Matheson Road if you're going towards the airport on 172 turn right at Matheson Road there's a fire training academy right there and the pits probably three times the size of this building and we this is a structure where we can practice it has pipes in it and it actually blows jet fuel out that's ignited to practice a force-fed fire which would be similar to like an engine line break-in and it pumping jet fuel as it's burning so you get trained in ARF you're not done a lot of times at the airport we all have specialty skills because of the airplanes our bread and butter but we also have to protect the airport so in doing that a rewind will stay with your and just look to my slide you know I've apologized I'm not quite as good as Donald Trump yet or Hillary but I'm working on it so yes so if you look this is how we normally see the airport fire fighters covered in foam there's a couple reasons foam is our primary extinguishing agent it a combination of water and foam concentrate it's a percentage it's basically a 3% foam concentrate so to make a hundred gallons of this finished white stuff we need ninety seven gallons of water and three gallons of the foam concentrate so it's a three percent there are different styles there's different types what's where we have some problems is we use that gasoline tanker gasoline is similar to jet fuel and avgas being it's a hydrocarbon okay you have a glass water we've all seen water gasoline the hydrocarbons float on the surface the foam we have is specifically designed to fight those type fires when you get the gasoline tanker that's 85% ethanol ethanol is an alcohol based system if we put our foam on an alcohol fire it just subsets it there's a special kind of foam it's alcohol resistant foam and there's additives we can get but the FAA does not allow them they don't recognize them for commercial air air travel so we are just held to straight a triple F foam and we have had a call-out I think was Baltimore City for an acetone truck and we showed up and we're like it doesn't really does really we can't really do anything about it but we'll try but you need to keep calling all the resources now for you guys you all GA aircraft so runs on gas with it with a really low flash point some of gasoline so we've had some individuals ask us why we would put foam when there's no fire okay this is how the a trip left foam works the fuel fire burns on top of the fuel as the foam blanket is applied you have the white bubbles but if you notice right in front of it is a film the a triple F stands for aqueous film forming foam this is what actually extinguishes the fire the bubbles help cool and and can keep it there but it's that film that spreads across the surface of the liquid and basically separate you know snuffs out the fire so we'll use a gas leak in the summer with a high temperature we will foam a fuel spill just to suppress the vapors because this will also suppress you know on a non-fire incident it will suppress vapors too so we've done that for fuel spills and depending when you look at flash points flash point of AB gas like negative 40 just like gasoline so even a winter day that's given off vapors and it can touch off jet fuel whose flash point is at 100 degrees Fahrenheit a lot of people say well it's only 80 degrees or it's 90 degrees we've all walked out on a summer day and felt the asphalt it's a lot warmer on the asphalt on the tarmac and things like that so we will suppress vapours giving certain circumstances in that case as well considering what the danger is Foam is cheap okay Foam is very cheap but that's that's how foam works and you'll see a lot of times they'll put foam down and you watch the the on TV some of the incidents with aircraft and you see him keep spraying the foam depending on the temperature the weather requirements the foam blanket actually just like bubbles in your bathtub they start to go down as that happens the film starts weakening so we have to do what's called reapplying the foam you just every 10 15 minutes depending on weather conditions and fire situations we have to keep reapplying the foam to the situations under control any questions about the foam most of the time with an aircraft we're gonna use foam right off the bat now the trucks can go we can just pump straight water but with an aircraft we will use foam 99% of the time because of the risk of fuel and now when we train if you note went back to that picture training when we train our Pitts we train with just water so it's a lot more challenging we actually there's techniques we use to push the fire with with the hose lines we'll come in with two and actually separate the fire and push it back as to mimic creating a fire lane foam it's much easier because as it goes down at coats and runs with it with just water it's similar to like blow and steam off your coffee cup if you don't keep blowing it it just comes right back and starts steaming up then there's different techniques we use for that another yes it could be each airports different there might be something down there with that any fuel if there's a fuel spill the vapors given off until it's cleaned up yeah that's not something you want to do now no will look like the test pilot mode but so that's and it's water your cheapest extinguishing agent that most apartments use just water foam is next the next chemical we have is what's called purple K or potassium bicarbonate if you've ever seen anybody hopefully has never had the chance to use a ABC fire extinguisher it's a it's a powder comes out this is this is not BWI but our trucks are all capable the big trucks of dispersing that agent some of our trucks have a special tool that I'll show you the next one but this this chemical does is depending on the the situation of fire foam by itself will work very good on a two dimensional fire you have a spill under an aircraft it catches fire it's a static two dimensional fire situation when you start getting to a three dimensional fire like that first video I showed you with the pipes that are pushing the fuel out and it ends igniting now you what we call a three-dimensional fire length width and now you have high the purple K comes in and what that we use it in conjunction with foam and all that chemical does it breaks that chemical reaction of the fire for just a split second it'll it'll break that chemical reaction but herein lies why we have to use it with the phone if you just use this chemical you will put the fire out the fuel will continue to flow and the heat will still be there this will not cool anything so that's why we use it with the foam after this goes in breaks that chemical reaction snuffs the flame the foam and the water work is cooling and they suppress the vapors so they have to we use them in conjunction with each other I've had a couple situations where we we weren't able to use that on some industrial applications you have to do some thinking because you you're really limited but in our situations at the airport our vehicles are set up to flow the purple K and the water though they'll flow it both from the truck Turks like this we also have handline turrets or hand lined nozzles that look like this but most of us have seen regular fire department nozzles they look like that with the hose line that comes in and skorts the water our crash trucks are equipped with these these Williams nozzles they're called a hydra cam nozzle what they do is this is the foam and water line that comes through and sprays like a regular fire hose this line here is the purple k it comes in from pressurized tank and is injected right into the middle of the hook the water stream through that nozzle what that does is you don't get that powder effect it's not affected by wind so you turn your foam purple but it carries it a lot farther you have a lot more control and from somebody who's used these it takes it takes some getting used to D to use a nozzle with two shut offs we do a lot of training with these but our crash trucks are equipped with all these lines and it works very well because the old the older system with just the just the purple K and just the powder it was independent you didn't get as far of a reach you had to really be uncomfortably close to something to use that those lines these lines you have much much greater reach much greater safety and much more control and when I go into some of the other things the airport beyond ARF that's why we called it the airport firefighter there's other training we have for example they're about 75% of the department at BWI or hazmat technicians because you get things on aircraft and nowadays with all the terrorist threats the WMDs and things like that that 75% of us or hazmat technicians notice that most most of us are all rescue technicians to use the jaws of life vehicle rescue also machinery because we have a lot of moving parts the the baggage belts so on so forth spread out throughout their airport and then we're also confined space certified so depending on where it happens some of the baggage tunnels underneath the airport you can get rather claustrophobic if you're up in there and even even some of the areas on board and aircraft if you have somebody go down from a vapor in the luggage compartment of an aircraft that can be a confined space depending on how far into the aircraft they are so it's a lot of training that goes on and every day it's hours of training so that's pretty much just the fire fighter the next step would be like myself a driver you have to get trained on that there's more classes there's as I said there's a special the are fire fighter aircraft rescue firefighting class be a driver there's the arf driver operator that shows you how to operate the the crash trucks and approach different scenarios and things like that we have at BWI which we're very lucky to have and it helps our drivers immensely is this what we call the simulator so what it is it's basically the cab down of one of our crash trucks with the computer model of BWI Airport so we can go over there and there's an operator that runs the computer system and it it was extremely accurate as far as taxiway layouts runway layouts they can change day/night weather scenarios they can blow tires on the truck so you get used to it and you it actually helps when you figure the cost one of our new trucks just came in at about right around 1.2 million so you think of the advantages being able to take somebody and for a couple weeks put them in one of these before you let them go and one of the end and if you guys from pilot stand points there's not much room for error on an airport when you start factoring aircraft you know ground control and things like that there's there's a lot of moving things out there and it's much better for us to evaluate new drivers on the simulators before we turn them over this is a look of the interior of the simulator it's not much it's pretty very similar to one of the other the older crash truck your two joysticks for your nozzles steering wheel in your gauges and the screens or all trap all the way around you you even have your mirror so you can see what's behind you we were talking a little earlier about the motion sickness these have gotten more guys and ladies sick than anything I know it's been good we've had even one time they brought down the ground controllers and we put them in the simulator so they could experience what we experienced down on the ground and and they thought it was a really good learning experience because their airfield is from five stories up it's another thing when you're on the ground on the trucks going up and down hills and things like that so it's been a very good learning tool and a very useful tool so we'll get into the equipment that we get to drive these are our two older crash trucks these are a one Titans these crash trucks carry 3,000 gallons of water 425 gallons of foam and 450 pounds of that purple K dry dry chemical dry powder excuse me they have two turrets one on the roof one on the bumper the vehicle can go pretty much anywhere the tires on these vehicles are about my shoulder height so it'll give you an idea of - and width wise they're 11 foot wide those are about 46 foot long roughly so it's a big vehicle driven by one one individual and everything can be run right from the right from the driver's seat it goes in pump discharges if you seen the joystick it looks just like that and you can discharge your tank of water quicker than you'd like to these believe it 2,000 force I think they're 2004's and they're due to be replaced 2017 2018 so we get about 15 years and then F a once because the the progress that that that it makes is unbelievable it really is when you compare these and I'll show you our Newton the newer ones they usually pass them on to another airport like one of the ones we retired our old ash gosh went to Hagerstown we had another we have another ash gosh that's there that we've got a storage they're not sure what they're gonna do with that whether they're gonna keep it for a training academy like a training academy truck or something like that but these are the newer the newer models these are the Oshkosh strikers they're called the global striker they're the ones that are shipped all over the world you can you can just see from the cab the difference of the shape and and the big difference is this new feature here which is the high reach extendable turret have a video at the end I had it working hopefully it'll continue to work which shows one of these vehicles actually piercing a 737 so you can see how it pierces this is a 50-foot boom there's a basically for lack of a better term there's a five-foot spike on the end of it and the end of the spike has holes what happens is if it's a cargo aircraft fire or cabin fire the crash truck would come up to the side of the aircraft pierce the side of it and turn on the the piercing nozzle water flow it'll flow 250 gallons a minute and basically it's like a sprinkler head inside the aircraft it takes a lot of getting used to and there's a lot of we have to the amount of training we have to do on them to keep proficient is is quite extraordinary but like that vehicle there that's our newest that's approximately like I said about 1.2 million dollars the windshield no one will tell me how much it costs the windshield runs from here all the way back to here it's a curved piece of glass about the size of this table that runs all the way over your head no one wants to be the first one to put a ding in one but the trucks are really really amazing underneath the vehicles you can see here here our sprinkler heads so if to approach the aircraft and there's burning fuel you put the sprinklers on underneath it'll blush push foam out underneath the truck so you can get within range of the aircraft the front there's sprinklers across the front that drip water down because of the heat that jet fuel gives off the BTUs to keep your windshield in the front of your truck from catching fire so it's it's really an amazing piece of equipment compartments are very very Spartan they don't carry the equipment like a regular fire truck does there's hand lines on there so if we do have to pull off a hand line there's also that hydro chem line that can pull off and we can discharge agent but the primary function of these trucks is to get in getting close and knock down as much of the fire as they can so hopefully if you fly into BWI you'll never have to meet one of them but a impressive piece of equipment here's a still picture of what one looks like piercing so this is another training aircraft we have up there dc-10 there's a training prop right here that we use for practice so we'll practice making an approach the boom comes up and we just practice piercing that piercing that prop in different locations to assist us with that this is our the other twin to that 132 they have cameras located on the end of the boom so for some reason we wanted to go up and look down an aircraft like put the the end of the boom inside an aircraft and turn the camera we could look down it they will also have FLIR cameras on them where we can scan the side of an aircraft to see if there's any hot spots we can scan brakes if the plane comes in and we have a hot brake issue we can scan the brakes of the aircraft to see what the temperature is and of course the one of the main things with the FLIR is we've all seen the aircraft videos on TV there is a tremendous amount of hydrocarbon smoke and it helps us see through that so we can make sure the agent that we have is getting to where it needs to be put when you figure 3,000 gallons sounds like a lot of water with these trucks flowing full that truck will be empty in 90 seconds so you don't have a lot of time one of the most senior guys that taught me how to rock operate one of the vehicles and it was an amazing tactic when you're discharging holding the trigger hold your breath when you have to breathe let up check your cameras and make sure your agents going where it needs to be going get back in it again because you know at 3 o'clock in morning when there's smoke you can you can be missing hot spots as you're flowing with with that amount of water coming out of the front of your truck you don't have much much time tactic wise at BWI with three vehicles the first vehicle will take up a position to separate the the passengers from the fire the second vehicle will come in and assist him the third vehicle we usually will stand back depending on the situation there's no hard and fast rules that way were one of the first two trucks run out of agent there's no lag in time when one truck the first truck let's say he runs out of his water and foam and he's got to go refill water that third truck can move right in and keep the pressure on the crash trucks are all FLIR equipped now the engines the talents that the normal like we see here on Ken island in Easton though those are not FLE equipped they have the handheld thermal imaging camera for the cruise that that was a very horrible situation but yeah and a lot of the flares it depends I'm not a FLIR expert depending on the temperature and what was happening and I'm not saying if she was let's say underneath a piece of wreckage or something was blocking them the FLIR might I pick it up what these won't pick up is chain-link fences you and you think chain-link fences outside in the winter ambient air temperature it's not picking up that difference now one of the things we're trained we have to know I mean we have maps and we have to be able to draw everything but if you were driving just using your FLIR which we sometimes have to do in the smoke and stuff you have to be very careful because if it's ambient temperatures it won't pick it up but I'm raising pieces of equipment that can do a lot I told you guys before you asked about the fuel tank fire or the fuel truck that's the picture from 895 whether it were was coming in with that with that gasoline tanker the one off the bridge he basically this is one of the older crash trucks same same capacities an older style they uh this is a t 3000 he made one pass he started up here and made one pass he had to back up to get this because it was a little out of his first reach but that that's the amount of fire that these vehicles can put out as mind-boggling effective depending on you could figure 100 125 if you put it but a lot of it depends on wind and hand and things like that but you can see he's reaching its that four-lane highway he's all the way over to the shoulder and that and and those trucks can drive and discharge agent so he locked it over 90 degrees and just feathered it up and down and went right down the lane and knocked it out and you can see the lot of times we'll have spotters around the truck as its operating some of the training any questions the trucks are refilled it's a good question I'm gonna back up a slide and show you that it's easy to show you on this if you look right here you can see that the the fill ports it fills with a regular fire hose we and we have what we call rapid resupply drills at the station that we do twice a year just to make sure we can and we can refill one of these trucks I think my best time that we've had is two minutes nine seconds because there's pressure requirements and things like that but we can put 3,000 gallons of water on board and just about two minutes the foam the foam that's not we have to go back to the station for that but the way we usually get a bang get about two and a half three tanks of water for one tank of foam so you can you can get a couple refills of water with that three percent ratio to the one tank of foam the newer ones because they want to be more streamlined than aerodynamic because we buy these for their fuel efficiency is bahut is behind this door right here okay you basically roll that up and it looks just like the other one there's your fill parts right there that you can fill the truck up with with the training we have to have we have to every year we have to get training on and there's 11 categories real quick that's airport familiar ization that's runways taxiways driving are driving on the aircraft aircraft familiar ization so depending on you know every month we do a different type of aircraft whether it's a CRJ 737 one of the air buses rescue and firefighting personnel safety emergency communications the use of the hose use of nozzles hoses and appliances which would be like that Heydrich am not lying things like that application of the extinguishing agents that we have basically the water the foam the the purple k emergency aircraft evacuations that's one of the ones you're seeing here this would be like I talked about in the beginning of a class where the aircrew incapacitated can't open the doors we practice up the ladder opening the doors and we'll go around an aircraft and do this this was just done a little bit a little while ago on a 737 that well that's what you can see here is one of the things we train everybody you've got there your your slide warning device and it's a bar runs across here Southwest is has been a great partner they upgraded their simulators that they use for their flight crews and they actually we have their old simulators in our fire station so they were nice enough to bring them over and we can practice trying to reach in there and unhook in the bar and things like that but the bigger the bigger trick is and this is what because you have to throw that door it's it's it's a considerable it's a considerable a half to that door and then some of the last thing is firefighting operations adapting and using structural equipment for aircraft rescue aircraft cargo hazards and then firefighter duties in the airport plan so continually all year round and last is we have to we have to have one live fire drill every year where that one video show of the guys going in with the fire we have to do everybody in the apartment has to do at least one of those a year with actual JP the jet fuel also once every three years the airport has to run a large-scale emergency drill this is one of those drills we called the E Plex where we bring in BWI an aroma County Howard camp pretty much any emergency service in the state of Maryland comes up we practice mass casualty we practice you know inner inner department communications it's actually a very good training exercise we do want at one of them every three years so you can see this is just one of the mass casualty triage staging areas we have volunteers come in they get moulage it up they put the make a bomb to look to make the wounds look real so we can practice prioritizing the the patients and we actually have at the airport a for lack of a better word it's a it's a large three axle like landscape trailer that is loaded with nothing but medical equipment for two hundred victims backboards oxygens everything is just loaded ready to go in case of a worst case scenario but we do one of them every three years we do all that training so that when things like this happen we have a plan so you can see it can happen anytime that was a an engine fire but it's not all emergency this is one of the better things we get to do at the airport is there the honor flights that we do for the veterans so that is pretty much we try to get every honor flight that comes in we give them the arch and every now and then for other special scenarios like when the Ravens came back in from winning the Superbowl we gave them a water arch and of course pilot retiring and things like that we do the water archers for them at BWI I've done a couple for pilots retiring so it is pretty good one of the last things I will tell you and I wanted to go over this being that you guys are pilots at BWI we have an alert system basically it's it's if you're in the air and you have an emergency the tower will classify it as hopefully just one of two alerts and not the third one and you'll understand why when I tell you what the alerts are the first one we have the BWI is an alert one which is also known as a local standby that's when an aircraft has or suspected to have an operational defect the D jet defect should not normally call a serious difficulty for the aircraft to achieve a safe landing I wrote that down to make sure I had it the way the advisory circular said at BWI the tower has a has a phone as soon as that phone comes up an alert tone goes off on our station it's hardwired they'll pick it up and they will give the following information the aircraft type number of passengers and crew on board the amount of fuel remaining on board and the nature of emergency so those and then any other pertinent information landing on ten to eight the landing runway how many minutes out they are and they will they'll call us and tell us we have an alert one an alert one the local standby everybody goes out gears up trucks are started usually the crash trucks pull out of the fire station sit on the apron and we wait for further instruction now depending on the nature of the emergency the division chief on board and upgrade that to the next level of alert the next level being alert to which is a full emergency that's when an aircraft has or suspected of having an operational defect that affects normal flight operations to the extent that there is a danger of an accident at that position on BWI we go to our standby positions I'll use this board right here this is the runway here so the standby positions one goes to the approach end one one crash truck stays midfield the other crash truck makes it goes to the departure end of the runway so we've got everything covered if they come in short we've got a vehicle there they go long we have a vehicle there if they're in the middle we have vehicles coming from each direction so that's the alert two now you'll understand why I said hopefully you never get to the third one which is an alert 3 which is actual an aircraft accident the notes that an aircraft accident has occurred it can be on airport property off airport property and it doesn't necessarily have to be you know it could be aircraft into a tug we've had some ones where aircraft have have gone off the runway the alert 3 that they had over the summer that we got that 737 from was an incident where a backing incident happened with the tug in the front landing gear collapsed so it does it does happen but those are the three systems so depending on what the nature of mergency you give to the air traffic controller they're going to determine whether it's a one two or three for us any questions yes yes this is the division chief on duty we have a division chief on duty at the airport he has his own it's a it's a suburban now and then the the line officers the the chief of the department and his three deputies also have vehicles but the division chief of the in charge of the shift has his own vehicle the captain rides on the latter Tower of the lieutenant rides on the engine and the crash trucks are all by themselves and there's really some people asked you know well does this truck always go to the nose is this one always and it's very difficult because I'm sure like you like most flights no two are the same any incident and it's not gonna be the same and the first truck if the aircraft was let's say shedding parts and he went down and took out three of his tires well he's out of that he's out of the situation so you know the trucks have to jockey for position so we just we just communicate with each other and and and we work off of how the trucks arrived and what the situation is yes all firefighters BWI have our own portable radio all the vehicles have a mobile radio that talks to the portable radios and our dispatch center and they also are equipped with the ground radio so any of the vehicles I'm at a BWI can talk to the ground their ground controllers and the aircraft and we have this special like they'll tell us to switch over to emergency frequencies so we're not backing up the ground channels and things like that so but we can talk to the pilots to each other so we have a lot of communications actually the headsets for the driver operators it takes a little getting used to this year is fire dispatch this year is ground control so you have to and we have a switch that we just switch forward and back to whether we're talking to fire personnel or aircraft so it takes a little getting used to and to be here and most of us the fire radio gets turned down while we're out on the so we can concentrate and just what the pilots saying what his issues are and things like that see if this works it was working before so this is you can see how they're opening this would be some reason we pull up the doors aren't open this is one of our new guys so this is probably one of his first times ever doing this there's no know we knew in that case we'd opened that a couple times but they all know to check that yeah yeah this is one of those charts gum piercing the aircraft one of those high reach extendable turrets I was hesitant the shoulders to a bunch of pilots figuring they wouldn't really wants to see what we'd be doing at the aircraft but it just shows that really you can see from the video how far the standoff is and how much reach the vehicles have for for a cargo fire it's really quite quite a thing well what the with that that space between the window that comes out to right a white light about over your head because we were in there when we were doing that because they that's the window where they say there's not that much and you don't want to get into the overhead bins but we're curious to see just where that would come out inside the airplane it came out right as I sat and one of the seats and just okay and then there's the example of it going into the cargo area where I can pierce into the cargo area unfortunately no doesn't have it it comes into about here it sticks about that far into the cargo area so if you did have a luggage you know fire something down in the cargo bay you could go right in and and deal with that at least take a lot of the fight out of the situation before you start sending people into the aircraft that's just some of the training that was an aircraft we had we just did that training a couple days ago is the hamachi rescue tools is right outside the airport they're very good about letting us work with their tools and and work with new tools you can see there's because we have to practice we have a lot of vehicle accident 195 you know 295 even you'd be surprised at the access that we have right around the terminal so we go over to the lot row and they let us use this tool right here is actually has has special tips on it for cutting open aircraft skin yes the manufacturer of her macho rescue tools is right outside the airport property and great great individuals great individuals so we actually got some cars and let us come over there and use our tools use some of their new tools it's it's pretty impressive if you ever want to see this is the BWI fire rescues Twitter page so as we do training throughout the year it goes on there if you guys want to see just what's going on with BWI Fire Rescue our chief goes out and put stuff on there and that's better any questions yes sir oh is that the yes that's the one where they had the uncontrolled engine that the the same video that you've seen we've seen so far where you're on the unburned side we haven't gotten able to see that that burned side yeah no I haven't seen anything from the other side it's just like the one in Las Vegas you had a lot of video of the the one side by the camera but you couldn't get to the other side where was most of the fire taking place believe me we'll get the V we try to watch that and we just try to learn from what goes on and you know it's yes yes and if you look at the one side of that I think they have it in here you can see the extent of the the fuselage burning behind it where FedEx one she that was dc-10 it it's piled off into the but that you can see just how much and if you get a good up-close video of that you can actually see where the skin of the aircraft started to melt yeah oh yeah you can see just how the the wing hit the ground and everything like that so you can see how quickly these they hold up well but we're given the heat and the BTU I mean for example had yep well uh jet fuel for it gives off 1900 BTUs per pound it equates to about a hundred twenty-eight thousand BTUs per gallon so times that by fully-loaded there's a lot of a lot of BTUs being given off which is a lot which is why you see the the airport firefighters with a silver gear and that's pretty much it's it's the same as regular firefighter gear that you wear for structural fires but with an aluminized coating and that's pretty much just to reflect the radiant heat it works very well so but ya know this are the the Chiefs and the BWI do a pretty good job of updating that this this Twitter so I'm not on Twitter they just told me about it so I you just go type it in in it and you can still get the feeds it depends like in that situation the videos that I saw were you saw the one truck come in here and then you saw the other truck come in and he kind of stopped the wait for people and then he came around this side it's it's I wasn't in these truck so I can't say I'm pretty sure the first truck his thing he because we couldn't see I'm pretty sure he saw a lot of impingement on the fuselage priority one is to protect that fuselage to protect the people so that's probably why he came in in that direction it coated that fuselage of the foam to try to make sure it didn't get inside the aircraft which then you have a whole different animal and this the the the other one that came around the front he was probably coming or like I said support that guy could work work together on him and the other the other thing is by keeping it on this way there not pushing it to the where the slides aren't everybody's coming down they're trying to keep that situation boxed up in one area and so that that's what i can assume but i can talk about it all day those guys did a great job a great job for what they had any other questions suggestions oh no problem and all i said folks the video my twitter page is here and it gives you all the all of all the things i mean was pretty if you guys are ever flying you want to learn CPR we have our kiosk there it's a CPR chaos it gives you the timing for the new home I can get you yep I get you contact information not a problem but yeah that's a excellent one well if nobody has any questions thank you very much and hopefully hopefully we'll never meet

Channel: QACTV

Views: 3,242

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: qactv, qa tv, qatv, queen, anne's, county, eastern, shore, maryland, community, bay bridge airport, chesapeake sport pilot, helen woods, fire fighting, fire and rescue, airplanes on fire, airplane crashes, BWI

Id: hIBdYqk5ssY

Length: 59min 39sec (3579 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 14 2016