The Great Falls International Airport has a new addition to help them better combat aircraft fires - a state-of-the-art fire engine unlike any other in Montana. Darnell Stucker, assistant fire chief with the Montana Air National Guard, noted, "The engine on it that is has is a Caterpillar engine, is 680 horsepower. It goes zero to 50 in 23 seconds with a top speed of 74 miles per hour."The new addition to the airport is part of an FAA mandate for Cat 3 runways, requiring airports to be equipped with a fire engine that can get to the midpoint of a runway in three minutes or less.
Stucker explained, "It takes 90 seconds for a fire to go through a fuselage in an aircraft. So the first truck has to be there in three minutes and all the other fire trucks need to be there in four minutes."
The $750,000 truck was 95% paid for by the FAA.
Last week crews spent 10 hours a day training on the new machine.
Stucker said, "We are very fortunate here not to have very large frame aircraft catch on fire, but we have had numerous aircrafts that have unfortunately crashed and we have had some fatalities up here."
The truck holds 1,500 gallons of water, 210 gallons of foam and weighs about 62,000 pounds.
It also has something very unique - an infared camera.
Stucker explained, "We are actually able to go out on the runway in basically zero visibility...and this FLIR camera will actually guide us through the roads and we can see everything through this FLIR camera. It's going to be an interesting concept for us to be able to have that capability."
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