Originally Posted by
Mr Approach
Given that aircraft do not necessarily crash on an airport, I would have thought utilising the local State RFFS, with a permanent station at the airport, would have made more sense.
The fire people would then be able to rotate, and be both practised at putting out fires and trained to fight aircraft fires, wherever they were...
This would remove ARFFS from that disaster area called Airservices Australia, put the airports in charge of what is, after all, an airport service, and have practised fire people on hand if there was an incident.
Local RFFS simply don’t have the capability to deal with aviation accidents versus their normal run of the mill house fire. They don’t have the ability to lay foam for undercarriage failures nor can they handle a Jet A1 fire with their water based solutions. They don’t have
10 m long, 30-tonne vehicles that can deliver 5700 litres of foam per minute and can throw foam in excess of 80 metres from their roof-mounted monitor.
It’s a fact that most crashes do occur at the airport where RFF can make a difference, I am not defending Airservices but the people in ARFFS, when I hit the crash button in the tower they never let me down.