I did a volunteer thing where I went to the airport and pretended to be in an air crash with dozens of other people. The FAA wanted the airport to practice this sort of thing every three years, to test emergency response and (as a secondary objective) practice getting status updates of simulated passengers to simulated friends/relatives waiting at the airport. They gave me a card with a fake name (Jayden Ricks) and address and description of how badly I was injured. Then they bussed us out over and under the runways until we got to a passenger jet they set on fire occasionally for the firefighters to practice on. The chief fire safety guy set off some sort of pyrotechnics in the jet to make it start smoking pretty seriously. I don’t know if there was actual fire on board.
(They didn’t allow us to pull out our phones and take pictures, so this is a Google Maps photo of the jet. It has seen better days.) We waited as a number of special airport fire trucks rushed up to the plane and started shooting it with water cannons. Then a line of airport police arrived, then a number of ambulances from around the area.
There were about a hundred and fifty of us passengers. If we were standing on the tarmac, we were considered to be to be able to get off of the plane under our own power at least. The fire safety officer who briefed us said that there were many pieces of wood propped up in the seatbacks on the plane that represented passengers that straight up did not make it. The rest of us were either “casualties” or “survivors”, which meant uninjured. I wasn’t uninjured.
My condition was pretty grim, I had an obvious head wound (they didn’t put any wound makeup on us, this was all in the realm of imagination) and no pulse, so one airport policeman wasted his breath on me for a while trying to see if I could talk or walk. Then some firefighters (including one awfully pretty woman) tried doing CPR on me (in the sense of “hey, we’re doing CPR on you”) until someone who was more in charge came over, looked at my chart more closely and said “nope, he’s dead, move on.” Then they left me, which made me feel kind of sad… but that’s triage in a mass casualty incident, I guess. Then later, after the survivors that could walk had been evacuated and most of the injured had been transported away, they said I had “gotten better” so I should ride in an ambulance to the “hospital”, which was the airport fire station, instead of wherever they set up their morgue. I don’t know how I got better but the EMTs were calling me Lazarus and I was calling me a zombie. There at the fire station, they took my card with my name and address, and I got to chill out with other volunteers at a Salvation Army truck, where they dispensed snacks and hot drinks. I don’t know how successful the exercise was —there were evaluators walking around, so there was definitely some right ways and wrong ways to approach it—but I was just a tiny broken cog in a vaster machine.
In all, it was a cool experience. The first responders and we civilians got to play in a massive game of make believe. I’d definitely do it again if there’s another opportunity. They say the FAA makes them do it every three years, and MSP picks a different airline to host it. This time it was Southwest Airlines, which made all us volunteers bleakly laugh, considering their recent air fatality. They played their role as “Liberty Airlines”. So don’t fly Liberty Airlines! Their planes crash!
