Video: Mock drill at Mumbai airport for emergency aircraft fire-landing
Mumbai: In one of its major mock drills at the Mumbai airport, various security agencies on Thursday created an artificial emergency aircraft fire-landing situation in which around 800 people participated.
The drill included ten famous hospitals of the city, Mumbai fire brigade and police which played a major role in evacuation of dummy passengers from a dummy aircraft that was made by Mumbai International Airport Limited (MIAL).
Officials from various city airports were present to observe and point out the loopholes in the exercise practised to handle an emergency aircraft fire-landing situation.
The exercise began at 10.57 am and was concluded by 2 pm when the tail portion of the dummy flight XYZ 123 that took off from Hong Kong was set on fire assuming that the rare portion of the aircraft caught fire while landing.
161 dummy passengers and 10 crewmembers were evacuated from the aircraft. However, eight casualties were declared by the Chief Medical Officer of the airport, 33 passengers with severe injuries were rushed to major hospitals nearby the airport areas, 48 of them sustained minor injuries and were shifted to casualty area in the international terminal (T2), while 72 passengers and 10 crewmembers received no injuries.
The exercise involved state disaster management, CISF and city police for handling situation the also the local police for panchnama of the dead passengers and allowed the bodies to be moved out of the airport. Customs and immigration helped in clearing all the passengers to continue to be shifted to the hospital in cases of burnt passports, MIAL fire system along with the state fire department doused the fire.
“This is a major drill that is practised every two years in which all stake holders not only participate but also the top security personnel play a role of ‘observers’. The exercise was discussed in detail with all the positive and negative points in the exercise, in order to implement new operating procedures for a situation like this,” said an MIAL spokesperson.
The spokesperson further added, “MIAL conducted a full-scale Aerodrome Emergency Exercise – ‘Operation Black Panther’ which is a first-of-its-kind exercise held jointly with Hong-Kong based Cathay Pacific airline. A simulated aircraft disaster was enacted as a part of the mock drill.
