Frustrating fires in which cargo airline pilots narrowly escape from a freighter burning on an airport runway — and intense flames ultimately can rob accident investigators of causal evidence — have rekindled calls for wide-ranging reforms in the United States. With freighter traffic growth projections by Boeing Commercial Airplanes averaging 6.2 percent annually from 2006 to 2026, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) have joined freighter manufacturers, U.S. cargo airlines, aircraft rescue and fire fighting (ARFF) officials and pilot organizations in revisiting core assumptions about how to protect people, airplanes and cargo when freighter fires occur.
Debates about the reforms have not included much data on the incidence of these fires or formal risk analyses. But the sense of stakeholders expressing opinions at recent meetings is that the effectiveness of ARFF firefighters in these scenarios does make a difference in wheth…
