Puncturing Planes, Saving Lives

Rescue crews ripped into scrapped airliners Tuesday at San Bernardino International Airport, a dress rehearsal for saving passengers surrounded by smoldering metal and gushing fuel.

“You don’t know what [slicing] metal feels like until you get the pressure in your hands,” said Anna Anderson, an engineer with the state Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. “It twists this way and that, and you can’t prepare for what that’s like.”

The demonstrations kicked off the four-day Aircraft Rescue Research Project -- part trade show, part demolition derby. It was a publicly and privately sponsored event that attracted some 250 rescue workers, most of them firefighters, from Southern California and as far as Brazil and Singapore.

In a blocked-off lot, firefighters attacked airplane fuselages with axes and sledgehammers. They clipped wires and tubes with cutters big and small. They pounded windows with various tools -- some as effective as a pencil poking a tuna can.

Attendees in navy shirts and ball caps hunched on metal risers in front of hangars 1 and 2 and three retired plane carcasses, two of them Boeing 727s. Men hacked their way into a Hawaiian Airlines DC-9 where first-class passengers would sit, with a chorus of thwacks.

“For the victims inside the aircraft, sometimes the rescue is worse then the crash,” deadpanned Les Omans, a retired San Jose firefighter, into a microphone.

A crash’s fury can stun even veterans who have subdued building-high flames, as commercial plane accidents are rare. Only 100 or so were reported in the U.S. last year out of millions of departures, according to the National Transportation Safety Board.

But firefighters said disaster training had become more frequent -- and more urgent -- since the 2001 terrorist attacks.

When a firefighter responds to a plane crash, “it’s likely he hasn’t done this before,” Omans said. “It’s so spectacular, with the loss of life and human suffering. You’re just losing from the start.”

Russell Nunez, a Los Angeles firefighter, was among the second wave of responders to a 1991 crash at Los Angeles International Airport, in which 33 people died. A controller had cleared a USAir jet to land on a runway where a commuter plane was about to take off.

“There were people without a burn on them who died of smoke inhalation,” he said. Singed and crackling things littered the ground, and amid the confusion some passengers had fled to their connecting flights, he said.

The Los Angeles fire crew can train for 150-foot flames and 5,000-gallon fuel spills with its own mock plane. But its members came to trade anecdotes and tricks: One firefighter discovered that you can de-gunk a diamond-tip blade with WD-40.

So participants tried battering above and around the stubborn oval windows, and slicing stainless steel with various types of wire cutters. In a “MacGyver” moment, they discovered that a $13 store-bought version was one of the strongest.

Texas firefighters oohed over a slick prying-and-whacking tool from Florida. Others tittered as a firefighter kept dinging a window that wouldn’t budge. “It just got personal,” one man joked.

Some wandered past the dozen or so vendors’ tables, which offered items including headlamps displayed on gold mannequin heads and a giant cutter nicknamed “Great White.”

Palm Springs Fire Capt. Mike Wills said that even though he once responded to a crash that “crunched” a small plane, hands-on practice would help him during another go-round.

“It’s hard to know where to cut so I don’t slice the fuel line,” he said.