Successful Test Of Vernon Airport Emergency Plan

An emergency exercise at Vernon Regional Airport went off with few hitches this morning.

Airport Supervisor Ian Adkins says it’s a test and development of the airport’s Emergency Response Plan.

“Today’s exercise was basically to make sure that if and when there’s an event here at the airport here we’re prepared and we’re ready to handle that and make sure anybody that’s involved is safe and we can do what we can to make it work out best for everybody”

The scenario involved an income aircraft in trouble.

” Today’s scenario involved an aircraft that had a May Day May Day call. It had four people on board and it was rapidly losing fuel. So it was coming in basically to land as fast as they possibly could to get to the ground safely.”

RCMP, Fire, Ambulance, Bylaw officials, Search and Rescue and members of the flying club were all involved.

Ian Adkins says generally it went very well.

“There’s a few areas where we’re going to sit down and have some further discussions to find out if there is some areas where the plan was maybe unclear or if the participants weren’t in a full understanding of how the plan worked.”

He says none of that is major.

” Just having those emergency services. Ninety per cent of them made it in no problem as they should and one agency was having a little difficulty getting in. We need to fine tune and find out where that error was and how we can correct it so in the future that sort of thing doesn’t occur.”

The airport is mandated by Transport Canada to test it’s Emergency Response Plan in a full scale every four years and a table-top exercise every year.