You can’t fight what you don’t understand. An aircraft is not a building with wings on it. It has its own doors, its own hazards and its own rules, and the time to learn them is long before one is sitting on the runway with smoke coming out of it.

The airplane won’t wait for you to figure it out

I’ve been in this service a long time, and the mistake I see most in aircraft familiarization is treating it like a box to check. Somebody walks the crew around an airplane once a year, points at a few things, and everybody signs the roster. That’s not familiarization. That’s a tour.

On a real incident, there’s no time to stand at the nose and wonder how the door opens. You won’t have time to guess where the fuel is, where the batteries are or which way the evacuation slides deploy. Every second you spend figuring out the aircraft is a second you’re not putting agent on the fire or getting people out. Passengers in a burning fuselage are counting on a fast, clean attack, and that only happens when the crew already knows the machine.

What every firefighter should know cold

You don’t need to be an aircraft mechanic. But for every type of aircraft that regularly uses your airport, or flies over your district, you should be able to answer some basic questions without looking anything up:

• Doors and exits. Where they are, how they open from the outside and which direction they swing or slide.
• Fuel. Where the tanks are, which is usually the wings and often the center section, and how much the aircraft can carry.
• Engines and APU. Where they are, what the danger zones are at the intake and exhaust, and how to shut them down.
• Batteries and oxygen. Where they sit and what they do to a fire.
• Cut-in points. Where you can safely force entry if the doors won’t work.

Then go further. Know the approach hazards. Hot brakes and wheel assemblies are a real danger after a hard stop, and you don’t walk up to them from the side. Know the materials. Composites burn and break down differently than aluminum, and they can put fibers and toxic smoke in the air long after the flames are out. On some general aviation aircraft, there may be a ballistic parachute system with a rocket in it. On military aircraft, there may be ejection seats and ordnance. None of that is something you want to discover with your hands.

Get your hands on the real thing

Pictures and diagrams have their place. Manufacturers and airlines put out rescue information for a reason, and you should have it and study it. But nothing replaces standing next to the actual aircraft.

Talk to the people who fly and maintain them. Most airline and fixed-base operator crews are glad to help when you ask. Get on board when an aircraft is parked and safe. Open the doors yourself. Look at the overwing exits from the inside and the outside. Find the battery. Look at how the seats are spaced and how narrow the aisle really is in full gear. Then ask yourself how you’d move a hose line through it.

Do it on more than one type, and do it more than once. Fleets change. A new airline shows up, a new model comes into service, a cargo operator changes what it flies. If your familiarization program hasn’t changed in years, it probably doesn’t match what’s actually on your ramp.

Bring it back to the training ground

Familiarization doesn’t end at the airplane. Take what you learned and build it into your drills. When you run an evolution on a trainer, call out the aircraft type and make the crew talk through it. Where are the exits on this one? Where’s the fuel? Where are we approaching from, and why?

When you’re in the cab rolling toward an alert, the officer should be able to say a type and the whole crew should already have a picture in their heads. That picture is what gets you positioned right, gets the turret on the right spot and gets a hand line to the right door. Live fire training on a mobile or fixed aircraft trainer is where that picture gets tested, under heat and stress, before it counts.

The bottom line

Aircraft familiarization isn’t a walkaround once a year and a signature on a roster. It’s knowing the doors, the fuel, the engines, the hazards and the access points for every aircraft you could be called to, well enough that you don’t have to think about it. Get on the real aircraft. Talk to the people who fly and fix them. Build what you learn into every drill. The day the alarm goes off, the airplane won’t give you time to learn it.

Stay safe, and train like it matters.

Eric Makowski