An aircraft fire doesn’t give you time to think it over. The first decisions your crew makes, how you position and what you flow first, set up everything that follows. Knowing when the job belongs to the turret and when it belongs to a handline is one of the most important calls in ARFF, and it’s one we don’t train on nearly enough.

The turret buys you time

The turret is your heavy hitter. It puts a lot of agent on the fire fast, and it does it from the cab, with the crew still protected and the truck still able to move. When you pull up on a large running fuel fire around a fuselage, that’s what you need. Knock it down, get a foam blanket down, and cut the heat off the fuselage before it burns through.

That’s the whole point of the first minutes. You’re not trying to finish the fire with the turret. You’re trying to control it fast enough to protect the people inside and open an escape path.

The mistake I see most is crews treating the turret like a fire hose with the volume turned up. Flowing straight at the seat of a fuel fire, plunging the stream into the pool, chasing flames around the ramp. That drives fuel around, breaks up the blanket you just laid down and burns through agent you’re going to want later. Use the turret to lay foam on gently, let it flow across the surface and work it methodically. Volume is only an advantage when it’s applied with discipline.

The handline finishes the job

A turret can’t reach everything. Fires shielded by the wing, in the wheel wells, inside engine nacelles, under the fuselage and anywhere the aircraft blocks the stream belong to a handline. So do interior fires, hot spots that keep flaring up and the final extinguishment once the big fire is down.

A handline also lets a firefighter put agent exactly where it’s needed and see what it’s doing up close. That’s a good thing, but it comes at a cost. Pulling a line takes people off the truck, puts them on the ground in the heat and limits how fast that apparatus can move. Every handline is a trade, and the crew needs to understand what they’re giving up when they make it.

It’s almost never one or the other

Most of the time the answer is both, in the right order. The turret knocks it down and protects. The handlines move in under that protection to get what the turret can’t. When it’s run well, the two work together. The turret operator keeps the blanket intact over the escape path and the hose team, and the hose team stays in the area the blanket protects.

That only works when everyone knows the plan. A few things I want every crew to be able to answer before they ever go to the burn pit:

• What is the turret’s job on this fire: knockdown, protection or both?
• Where are the shielded areas the turret can’t hit?
• Who pulls the handline, and who stays on the truck?
• How much agent do you have left, and when do you need to start thinking about resupply?
• How do the turret operator and hose team talk to each other?

That last one gets missed a lot. A turret flowing over a hose team that doesn’t know it’s coming is a problem. So is a hose team walking out from under the protection the turret was giving them. Communication is what turns two separate operations into one attack.

Train the decision, not just the skill

Most departments train turret operation and handline advancement as separate skills. Somebody practices flowing the turret on the pad. Somebody else practices pulling and advancing a line. Both are needed. But on the real fire, the hard part isn’t operating the equipment. It’s deciding which tool to use, when, and handing off cleanly from one to the other.

So build drills that force the decision. Change the scenario so the fire is somewhere the turret can’t reach and see who recognizes it. Put the fire under a wing. Give the crew a limited amount of agent and see how they spend it. Then talk it through afterward. Why did you choose the turret there? What would you have done with half the water? Those conversations are where the judgment gets built.

Live fire is the best place to do this, because it’s the only place the crew sees what the agent is really doing. But you can start on a tabletop or in the bay with a diagram of the aircraft. The thinking is the same.

The bottom line

The turret buys you time and control. The handline gets into the places the turret can’t and finishes the fire. Neither one is the right answer by itself, and the crews who do this well are the ones who have practiced choosing, not just flowing. Train the decision as hard as you train the skill. When the fire is real, nobody’s going to have time to figure it out for the first time.

Stay safe, and train like it matters.

Eric Makowski