By Florida Weekly Staff | on September 14, 2022

Real fire, fake aircraft. Charlotte County’s new state-of-the-art simulator will train firefighters to battle blazes at airports. COURTESY PHOTO / WHARTON-SMITH

Towering orange flames 100 feet tall. A billowing plume of thick black smoke. An aircraft engulfed in a blaze.

And it’s happening along Interstate 75 toward southern Punta Gorda, not far from the highway.

Don’t panic and don’t dial 9-1-1. It’s not a real emergency. In fact, this scene hasn’t even occurred yet.

But later this year, it will — and it will repeat itself with increasing frequency.

What you’ll be witnessing is aircraft firefighting training using a state-of-the-art simulator.

Newly installed at the Charlotte County Fire & EMS administration, fleet maintenance and training facility on Airport Road (behind the Charlotte County Jail and adjacent to the Cheney Brothers warehouse), this simulator is only the second one of its kind in the United States.

Aircraft Rescue Fire Fighting is the firefighting specialty dedicated to protecting aviation interests, including passengers, pilots, crew or airport personnel, airport equipment and structures, and aircraft themselves.

The aircraft firefighting simulator is a Frankenstein’s monster combining elements of an Airbus A320 and Boeing 737, plus a propeller, in one — while the interior is designed to replicate that found on an actual aircraft. Charlotte County hopes to attract aircraft rescue firefighting departments from all over the southeastern United States to use the simulator for their training. SAMUEL BURNLEY / FLORIDA WEEKLY

Charlotte County’s new aircraft fire simulator installation is the realized vision of Battalion Chief Larry Lippel, a 24-year veteran of Charlotte County Fire & EMS. Mr. Lippel previously spent 10 years as a firefighter in Canton, Ohio, bringing his total years of experience to 34. He now oversees nine of the county’s 16 fire stations, including the one at Punta Gorda Airport.

He first introduced the idea of building an aircraft fire simulator back in 2016, around the same time he lobbied the state of Florida to recognize ARFF as a certified discipline within firefighting. Certification meant that ARFF-specific training, which is mandated by the Federal Aviation Administration, would now count toward firefighters’ Continuing Education Units in the state of Florida. Other specialties include Marine Ops, Haz-Mat, and Confined Spaces, but not all are certified disciplines according to the state. (Ironically, despite being surrounded by water, Florida doesn’t have a marine firefighting certification.)

Mr. Lippel’s efforts have not only benefited the civil servants in Charlotte County’s Fire & EMS, but also those in departments statewide.

“We put this in here first and foremost for Southwest Florida. (We asked) What can we do to help firefighters and first responders at the airports become better trained?” Mr. Lippel said. “We proposed an idea and, as a county, they picked it up and they wanted to know how it could be used.

The wide-reaching demand for ARFF training infrastructure is due to many factors, not the least of which is the requirement by the FAA that firefighters at all airports with commercial traffic train and recertify their skills annually .

Consider the high cost to build, operate, and maintain such facilities, and you get an inkling of why there are just a few in the entire state of Florida. Details of the project on Charlotte County’s website put the total cost at $9,392,610.

“The great thing about it is it’s a regional, state, national asset,” Mr. Lippel said. “I mean, it is really not confined to anyone. It’s not just Charlotte County, which is the best part about it.”

So the county hopes to attract the training business of departments all over the state — and even the entire southeastern United States.

Mike Nuñez, Wharton-Smith’s project manager for the ARFF installation, said the concrete under the plane itself is 2 feet thick, whereas it is 7 inches thick on the rest of the pad.

Charlotte’s ARFF simulator looks like a black airplane with a blue tail and wings that are too small to fly. Under the larger of the two wings hang two faux engines, one from an Airbus A320 and the other from a Boeing 737. On the opposite side of the plane, a short stub of a wing houses the turboprop style engine of a Q400, a common commuter aircraft, and there is a tail-mounted turbofan engine similar to that found on any number of regional jets.

As with the engines, one of the main landing gears is designed like the A320 and the other like the 737. This allows firefighters to practice putting out brake and tire fires. There are doors on either side of the fuselage made with true-to-life mechanisms that operate like those of the A320 and 737. The cargo doors, battery disconnect, auxiliary power unit — everything is as real as possible to allow firefighters to build muscle memory in practice that will be activated in a real-life scenario.

The realism continues inside the cabin, where two different seating configurations are used to simulate the A320 and 737, complete with exit doors over the wing, overhead bins, bathrooms, galleys and the cockpit.

“The goal is to be able to give a fire simulation for firefighters that takes away that whole sense of security (of knowing it isn’t real),” Mr. Nuñez said. “There is a safety net. There’s a lot of redundancy in this to keep people safe, but it allows them to train in a real-world experience so they can do spill fires, they can do engine fires, you can do a cabin fire. There’s a spot that’s got a rolling fire. You can do a galley fire. They have smoke machines that have nitrogen mixes in them so that the smoke doesn’t dissipate when you spray with water, because, otherwise, well, the simulation is over once you start spraying it.” ¦

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