Airport crash tender

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Dragon 1 of Palm Beach County Fire-Rescue at Palm Beach International Airport in West Palm Beach, Florida This truck has both a snozzle and a nozzle.

An airport crash tender is a specially featured fire engine designed for use at aerodromes and airports in aircraft accidents.

The features include a relatively good acceleration, ability to move on rough terrains outside the runway and airport area, large water capacity, fire fighting foam tank, a high-capacity pump, and water/foam cannons with a good throw distance. Newer ARFF vehicles also incorporate Twin Agent nozzles/injection systems to inject a stream of Purple-K dry chemical into the AFFF foam stream "knocking-down" the fire faster. Some also have Halotron tanks with handlines for situations that require a clean agent to be utilized. These features give the airport crash tenders a capability to reach an airplane rapidly, and rapidly put out large fires with jet fuel involved.

Some tenders have an elevated extended extinguishing arm, giving a possibility to raise a water/foam cannon into the height of approx. 10 - 20 meters. that can puncture through superficial structures of an aeroplane to fight a fire inside the fuselage.^[1].

Some arms have reinforced nozzles, called a Snozzle, that, according to the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is a "piercing nozzle on the fire truck that is used to penetrate an airplane's fuselage and dispense AFFF to extinguish fire inside the cabin or cargo area.^[2]

1 Standards
2 Examples
3 See also
4 References
5 Gallery of Airport Crash Tenders

[edit] Standards

Diagram of an airport crash tender using a puncture nozzle to spray inside of an airframe. The bottom left is a closeup of the head of the nozzle showing the puncture nozzle (top), a standard nozzle (bottom), a light and a thermal imager (left and right).

The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) has given standards and recommended practices on rescue fire fighting categories of civil aerodromes.^[3]^[4] National aviation authorities may have given even further requirements on aerodrome rescue and fire services.

The rescue fire services are based on a critical aircraft based on a statistical analysis of movements (take-offs and landings) on the airport. The aerodrome category is based on the size of the biggest aircraft taking a movement on the aerodrome. In addition, the number of movements of the critical aircraft is calculated, and the category can be decreased by one if the number of movements is lower than the standard describes. There are also minimum category levels based on e.g. the number of seats in the critical aircraft.

Depending on the airport category, the standards determine the minimum number of rescue fire-fighting vehicles. In addition, requirements are given on the water and foam capacities, discharge rates for foam solutions, and minimum dry chemical powder (complementary agent) amounts, reserve stocks of fire fighting agents, ability to operate on rough terrain, and acceleration of the air crash tenders. The end of each runway has to be achieved in a response time of two minutes, and any part of the movement area has to be achieved in a response time not exceeding three minutes.

[edit] Examples

Alvis Salamander UK, military, 1950s
Oshkosh Striker USA, commercial, current
Rosenbauer Panther, Austria, commercial, current

[edit] See also

Wikimedia Commons has media related to:

Airport crash tenders

[edit] References

^ Relyea; Robert G., Garnett; Edward V.: United States Patent Application, February 8, 1993. http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?patentnumber=5301756
^ NTSB
^ ICAO: Volume 1 - Aerodrome Design and Operations. Annex 14: Aerodrome Rescue and Fire Fighting Service (RFFS) requirements
^ ICAO: Airport Services Manual. Part 1 - Rescue and Fire Fighting. 3rd edition, 1990

[edit] Gallery of Airport Crash Tenders

Crashtender Royal Netherlands Air Force	Jyväskylä airport, Finland	Schuimbluswagen, Netherlands military fire brigade	Rosenbauer Panther 8x8, Leipzig-Altenburg Airport
Vehicle at Paderborn-Lippstadt / Germany		E-One airport crash tender used by Denver International Airport	A Range Rover airport crash tender at RAF Elvington
Alvis Salamander airport crash tender	Crash tender from Ostrava airport during NATO Day, Czech Republic	Crash Tender at a C-5 Galaxy crash on April 3, 2006 at Dover Air Force Base, Delaware.