Fighting airplane fire on runway

Question

Fire broke out from wing of an airliner after emergency landing. All were safely evacuated.

In this video, video, fire engines, standing by on run way as pilot have maydayed, rushed pass the airliner, positioned themselves in a 'formation' at up wind position, then, advanced toward the downwind airliners and started spraying foam.

In a documentary program, during a drill, the first fire engine started spraying foam as soon as it got within 'shooting range'. That is, saving extra time, 48 seconds in this real case, for all engines moving into upwind formation position.

What is the pro and con of these two approaches?

Answer 1

The first priority for any fire crew is to be part of the solution, and not become part of the problem.

Staying downwind of a kerosene fire would put them in the likely path of a lot of hot gas and smoke, even if the flames don't reach them.

Actually, there's an infamous story about a similar incident that happened in the company I work for, many years ago. They were carrying out a test that involved a decommissioned aircraft fuselage. They had a fire crew present as a safety precaution.

Something went wrong with the test, resulting in a fuel leak on to the ground followed by a fire. Unfortunately, the ground was sloping, and the burning fuel flowed gently downhill, heading straight towards the fire truck.

There is a video of the fire truck reversing away from the incident as fast as possible, which gets shown regularly to trainees as a classic example of "how not to do a risk assessment and make a safety plan"...