Originally Posted by GerardC
In my company, the F/E was designated (and trained) to fight a main deck fire.
This left the two of us manage the side panel : not ideal either...
The thing is that all this discussion of aircraft design dropping the engineer's panel is superfluous to my mind. Even if the aircraft is a 2-flight crew design, nothing is stopping cargo operators from carrying a third crew member - say a relief pilot (of any rank) on the jumpseat - and training all their flight crew in firefighting. The only question there is cost, and with the margins in cargo operations being significantly tighter than thier pax equivalents it would be a big question.
That being the case, we still don't know what kind of fire this was, or whether it would have been possible for a third crewmwmber to fight it.