Two Boeing 747s collided on the runway at Los Rodeos Airport in Tenerife on 27 March 1977, and 583 people died, which remains the largest death toll in any civil aviation accident. The case is taught everywhere as the origin of standardized cockpit and tower phraseology, and that is fair [...]
The link between an ambulance and an emergency department is the least exercised radio path in most EMS systems, and it is the one that carries a patient's clinical picture to the people who have to be ready when the doors open. It runs on channels nobody else uses, into [...]
A radio cache looks like a solved problem when it is sitting in the closet with everything charged and the lids closed. It stops looking solved somewhere around the second operational period, when the alkaline clamshells are gone, the sign-out sheet has forty illegible lines on it, half the... [...]
Turnout time is the one interval in a fire response that a department controls almost completely. The call volume is not yours, the traffic is not yours, and the distance to the house on the far county line is not yours, but the seconds between the alert hitting the station [...]
Public safety broadband gets sold in two directions at once, either as the thing that finally solves interoperability or as an expensive phone plan with a logo on it. Neither description survives contact with a working incident. What a dedicated public safety broadband effort actually delivers... [...]
A mayday is the one radio transmission in the fire service that has to work the first time, from a person who is frightened, breathing hard, wearing gloves, and possibly unable to see the radio in his hand. Everything around that transmission is a system: a button that sends something [...]
Every working radio user eventually stands in a spot where the portable that was fine two hundred feet ago produces nothing but noise, and the usual explanations offered on scene are wrong in interesting ways. This piece covers the physics a fire, EMS, police or dispatch reader actually needs:... [...]
Every emergency response in this country starts with a person in a chair answering a telephone, and almost everything that happens afterwards is shaped by what that person gets in the first thirty seconds. This piece covers the working mechanics of that job as I have seen it from the [...]
The policy answer to the communications failures of 11 September 2001 is written down in documents that carry dates and numbers, so it can be checked rather than recalled. A presidential directive in 2003 ordered a national incident management system, the system was issued in 2004 and has been... [...]
Three uniformed organisations and one coordinating office responded to the World Trade Center on the morning of 11 September 2001, each of them established its own command, and no single commander held the incident as a whole. The published investigations state that plainly, and they also record... [...]
