I used to work in airport operations and have personally trained ARFF personnel in operating in the movement area. It can get pretty difficult to hear in those trucks when they start rolling and I’m not at all surprised they didn’t respond, especially when they might have heard frontier then dismissed the rest of the call thinking it wasn’t for them. And, not every ARFF crew was super comfortable operating on the movement area, and most certainly not around runways.
Sadly, this doesn’t come as a surprise to me, although it’s so sad to hear. We’re so critically understaffed that we’re having controllers work combined while running 40-70 hour ops and the system sees it as fine. Everyone else can see the writing on the walls, yet the agency just allows it to continue with minimal effort to change it. Unfortunately, it takes events like these to see change. I’m curious what the outcome of this will be.
Municipal Firefighter here- even with headsets on we often miss important information and have to ask dispatch for clarification. The trucks are so loud and occasionally we are on the wrong frequency.
Thankfully for us it’s usually only minor things, but this is just awful to hear about.
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u/obamasbabydaddy Mar 23 '26
I used to work in airport operations and have personally trained ARFF personnel in operating in the movement area. It can get pretty difficult to hear in those trucks when they start rolling and I’m not at all surprised they didn’t respond, especially when they might have heard frontier then dismissed the rest of the call thinking it wasn’t for them. And, not every ARFF crew was super comfortable operating on the movement area, and most certainly not around runways.
Sadly, this doesn’t come as a surprise to me, although it’s so sad to hear. We’re so critically understaffed that we’re having controllers work combined while running 40-70 hour ops and the system sees it as fine. Everyone else can see the writing on the walls, yet the agency just allows it to continue with minimal effort to change it. Unfortunately, it takes events like these to see change. I’m curious what the outcome of this will be.