Fire in the air
Fire on board an aircraft is never taken lightly. Air traffic control will arrange for all other traffic to keep clear and the stricken machine will get a bee-line course to land as quickly as possible. Aircraft are equipped with fire fighting equipment of their own, but a major fire in an engine, for instance, is an emergency of the most serious kind. When the plane lands, airport rescue and fire fighting units will be standing by to intervene as necessary.
At this particular airport procedures stated that, once the airport fire brigade was alerted to respond to such an emergency, units of the municipal fire brigade, located some 10 miles away, were to be called in also to assist and supplement the local force. This otherwise sensible arrangement, combined with a dispatcher who was more bureaucrat than fireman, could however lead to a situation that was utterly funny, despite its outrageousness.
It was a relatively quiet Friday afternoon when a twin engine jet took off with 75 souls on board for its hop to the neighboring city. Controllers in the tower could watch a faultless lift off and initial climb and when the flight was transferred to departure control, a few, short radar vectors saw the plane firmly planted on the international airway.
The handoff to the next center also went smoothly and we glanced at the receding blip on the radar screen with quiet satisfaction. Happy landing, boys! The radar controller, to whom I was number two (his “co-coordinator”) was an old hand and though already occupied with the next few upcoming departures, his sixth sense made him look at the edge of the screen where the flight we had just handed over was supposed to be inching out of our sight at a steady 400 knots. What he saw made him look again, at the same time honing his senses to an absolute peak. The blip, instead of tracing a nice, straight line along the centerline of the airway, was at the topmost quadrant of an arc, apparently turning back towards us. This could only mean trouble. Bad trouble, if our experience was anything to go by.
Almost at the same moment the light indicating an incoming call from the neighboring center flashed on the intercom panel. “Your flight is reporting a serious engine fire; they are unable to maintain altitude. They are turning back and requesting priority for landing. She is still in our area, but considers them released to you. She is all yours… and good luck!”- said the impersonal voice.
By the time he finished, we had the flight back on our radio frequency and the captain reported much the same story. He sounded very calm even when he added that although the onboard fire-extinguisher had been emptied into to burning engine, his sensors still indicated an active fire. We could almost visualize the big silver bird, descending slowly with black smoke streaming behind it and those three men up front as calm as ever. Well, boys, we thought, make sure the cockpit gets onto the runway in one piece; the rest of the plane is likely to follow safely… But then it was time we, too, started earning our pay. With the radar controller busy clearing all other traffic and setting up a direct course to the nearest runway for our stricken machine, we made a quick mental calculation. Considering their present altitude, rate of descent and distance from the field, they could just about make it. Arrive on the runway, that is, instead of touching down in a cabbage field some distance away.
We signaled the tower and the emergency services, giving them all the relevant details, including our estimate for the arrival of the plane. A look at the radar screen and the tiny blip nicely lined up with the extended runway centerline confirmed that this latter was a bare five minutes away. The expensive rescue machinery, fortunately idle most of the time, got under way to save whatever could be saved.
The intercom light winked on once again. This time it was the control tower, with an urgent message from the airport fire brigade. “Could we delay the arrival of the flight by about fifteen minutes?”-they wanted to know. Without bothering to argue with the tower controller (who was as surprised by the request as I was myself), I asked him to connect me to the fire brigade dispatcher. The man, holed up in his warm little radio room, repeated the request, adding that units of the municipal fire brigade would not be able to make it to the field in under ten minutes and The Book said they were to respond together…
No, we did not ask the pilot, calm as he was, to fly a few circuits over the city, possibly watching the little red cars racing for the field, though I guess such a request would have made even him loose his temper somewhat. They landed two minutes later and the offending engine was covered in foam in no time at all. We eventually invited the dispatcher and his boss for a friendly talk and a visit to the control center which, as it turned out, they had never seen before. Collaborative resource and decision management was yet to be invented…
Soon afterwards, The Book was also changed.