Pilots and Firefighters

by Eric Villeda

June 10, 1998

Yesterday we had visitors from the United Kingdom. Patrick Tissington is a student at the Fire Service College and Mark Smitherman works with the British Fire Service. They came to talk to us about some decision making and crew resource management skills that they might be able to transfer from our research to their fire-fighting methods.

Some of the things that we talked about were decision strategies. What are the best ways to make decisions when dealing with such a large group if the situation is changing rapidly with the fire?

Another subject we spoke about was situation awareness: how can you tell when you have different groups of fire fighters if everyone isn't aware of what is going on? This is very hard to do because some fire fighters might be on a different side of the building, and you donÕt know if they are in the building. Meanwhile, you are trying to get the fire under control.

One of the parts of my research that we talked about was how planning might help them organize as a team to fight fires and what kind of techniques that they could use to maintain situation awareness. ItÕs difficult to stay in touch with one another and coordinate. They have radios, but once they enter a building the radio transmissions donÕt really work very well. A typical scenario is one team is fighting a fire and they need help. Other groups of fire fighters will arrive, have to be briefed on the situation, and then they have to try and coordinate with the people who are already there. ItÕs difficult to tell them exactly what you want them to do when they get there.

Similar situations that pilots could be in, which we have researched, are in-flight emergencies and mechanical problems with the airplane. The pilots have to diagnose the problem, which can be kind of difficult. If they know the problem they may not know the solution. Like front-line firefighters, their only way to communicate with other people is over the radio. For example, they can call maintenance control to try to solve the problem.

Studying flight crews is different from studying firefighters because communication in the cockpit is between a small number of people (maybe only two or three), but with a large fire you can have many people running around doing different things. One thing we shared about communication is verbalizing your actions or intentions to other team members. For example, a flight crew may be put in a holding pattern and one crewmember may say Òwhy donÕt I put the flaps out so the turn radius will be a bit closer.Ó This helps the other crewmember know what you are planning to do and why. This gives a shared mental model to make sure you are on the same page. Those kinds of communications are very effective - especially in situations where you are not familiar with the person you are working with.