KARACHI: “During the last Civil Aviation Authority exercise, I jumped on the inflatable emergency exit slide from the plane and twisted my ankle so badly that it got fractured. What’s worse, no one believed me when I cried out in pain. They said I was a great actress,” Emergency Response Planning (ERP) coordinator Syeda Tayyaba said, shaking her head in disbelief at the full-scale airport emergency exercise-2014 at Quaid-i-Azam International Airport on Tuesday.

Airport manager Asghar Naeem Khattak explained that the exercises were conducted on alternate years and involved the Airport Security Force (ASF), health emergency services, firefighters and all airlines. “It is an exercise to check our response time. We must respond to emergencies in minimum time. But no procedure is complete without putting it to the test. And we have umpires to tell us where we did well and where we went wrong. The day after the exercise we have the debriefing where the umpires point out to us our weaknesses,” he said.

The exercise itself involved a Boeing 737 plane heading towards the terminal from runway 07, the Gulistan-i-Jauhar side. The plane had 147 passengers on board of whom five played dead during the exercise, while 15 were classified as priority one and priority two. A fire was prepared giving off a lot of black smoke in the fire pit. And as the injured were brought out of the plane they were being carried to a triage area where medical professionals categorised them and tagged them for the ambulances to know the seriousness of their injuries.

“It’s all about how quickly the ambulances can arrive and how they can evacuate the plane and transport the passengers out of danger. Our motto is to save human lives, as is written in the Quran, ‘even one life saved means the saving of humanity’,” he said.

Waseem Hassan, a PIA engineer, said several people at the airport and a few civilians, too, were part of the ERP. “We meet every month or so for our ongoing training in handling emergencies at the airport,” he said.

ERP manager Ali Safir said PIA liaised with more than 2,000 volunteers for year-round training. “It’s a simulation exercise or drill which you get to see every two years but we train for it and keep ourselves prepared all the time,” he said.

Meanwhile, the umpires may point out some of the technical faults of the exercise that laymen may not have noticed but the most obvious fault was the escape slides at the front failing to inflate. “Thank God, I didn’t volunteer to come out that way this time,” said ERP coordinator Syeda Tayyaba who broke her ankle the last time. On Tuesday she was helping the others on the ground. “I would have broken all my bones for sure,” she shuddered pointing at the deflated rubber slide swaying from the plane.

Published in Dawn, September 10th , 2014