August 6, 2014 - F/O Steve Jangelis (Delta), ALPA Airport and Ground Environment (AGE) Group chair, led a panel titled “Landing a Distressed Airliner—What’s Waiting at the Airport?” which discussed best practices for pilots, controllers, airport operators and the FAA when aircraft crewmembers need to declare an emergency landing, particularly with an inflight fire.

David Siewert, Air Traffic manager, JFK Air Traffic Control Tower, and chairman, Airport Construction Advisory Council, advised, “The most important aspect of the initial call to ATC from an aircraft in distress is the specificity of the information you can provide.”

Jangelis noted, “It’s also very important for us to use the correct terminology. We’ve had an event when the pilot said, ‘Roll the trucks,’ and the airport sent airport management vehicles instead of fire and rescue. So we need to say, ‘We need emergency vehicles; please send an ARFF response.’”

Chief Timothy Sampey, O’Hare District Chief, Airport Operations, Chicago Fire Department, added, “We need to know not just [the number of] souls on board and the fuel on board—what have you done in the air? Have you blown the bottles? That’s very important information for us.”

F/O Jess Grigg (UPS), Aircraft Rescue and Fire Fighting chairman, Independent Pilots Association (IPA), told the riveting story of his experience as the first officer (and pilot flying) on the UPS DC-8 freighter that landed at Philadelphia in February 2006 with a rapidly spreading onboard fire. PHL ARFF responders needed eight hours to extinguish the fire, which resulted in a hull loss; the pilots escaped with seconds to spare.

Though the pilots had smelled an odor like burning wood since just after top of descent, they received no fire warning light until they were on base, when the cockpit suddenly filled with acrid smoke. Grigg landed with rapidly deteriorating visibility in the cockpit.
“By the grace of God, it was a clear night,” Grigg recalled. “I cut the corner [of the base-to-final turn] and joined about a half-mile final. If we’d had to fly the full ILS, we wouldn’t have made it.”

Marc Tonnacliff, Aircraft Firefighting Specialist, FAA Airport Safety and Standards, said that FAA rulemaking is underway to update and overhaul ARFF regulations; he cautioned, however, that the process will take at least two years. Tonnacliff pointed pilots to the results of ARFF-related tests that the FAA Technical Center conducted over an 18-month period on an A310 donated by FedEx.