Aircraft Carrier’s Flight Deck Fire Protection – an introduction

Aircraft carriers are wonderfully engineered floating and portable airports. Not many countries have them in their fleets and of those who have, usually have no more than one. The exception is the United States Navy with 10 Nimitz-class supercarriers on their fleet. As with most military topics, public information on this subject is scarce or inexistent. Thus, this article is about fire fighting on the American aircraft carriers‘ flight decks, which are the only carriers about which, after some digging, information is available.

A Moving Airport

On conventional airports (military, civilian or of mixed use) everything is as far apart as possible for safety reasons. There are minimum separation distances between runways and taxiways, between aircraft parking spots themselves and terminal buildings, etc. Plus, fuel farms are taken as far from the operational areas as possible and ammunition depots in military aerodromes have tight security and safety measures for obvious reasons. The people working on the apron have their movements restricted and carefully monitored in order to avoid accidents and damage to aircraft, the infrastructure or themselves.

Forget everything you’ve read in the paragraph above… Aircraft carriers have limited space and still have to meet the needs of an airport. On an area of about 4,5 acres (196 020 sqft or 18210 m²) all the magic happens.

Determining an airport’s RFFS Category

How many fire trucks does a certain airport have? This is a question almost no airline passenger asks. But certainly all pilots should be aware of what the RFFS at the departure, destination and alternative aerodromes are comprised of.

The minimum RFFS’ capabilities and equipment is (and I would say has to be) regulated: depending on what the user aircraft at the airport are, the number of firefighting vehicles and the number and quantities of fire extinguishing agents will vary.

As mentioned in the “What are the RFFS exactly?” article, the Federal Aviation Administration and ICAO have different ways of doing equivalent tasks: determining the rescue and fire fighting categories is one of those things.

Prior to going any deeper into the matter, it must be noted that an airport’s ARFF/RFFS category can change over time, as air carriers’ appear and disappear, their fleets change, etc.

What are the RFFS exactly?

The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO for short) is the United Nations’ agency created in 1944 to “promote the safe and orderly development of international civil aviation throughout the world”. What ICAO really does is setting standards and regulations about topics ranging from Personnel Licensing to Aerodromes or Units of Measurement to be Used in Air and Ground Operations, among quite a few other topics. These regulations can be of “mandatory” implementation or just recommendations and are detailed in ICAO’s 18 Annexes, which are the guidelines of civil air transportation in most of the countries worldwide. However, not complying with ICAO rules is not uncommon: the US’s Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has its own set of rules which do not always agree with ICAO’s. Or, in other countries a list of non-compliances with the Annexes is issued. (For example, in New Zealand)

In ICAO’s Annex 14 (Aerodromes) it is said that “The principal objective of a rescue and fire fighting service is to save lives”. Airports need a RFFS/ARFF even during “periods of reduced activity, irrespective of the number of movements” because accidents happen… when they happen. RFFS stands for Rescue and Fire Fighting Service while ARFF means Aircraft Rescue and Fire Fighting.