An emergency exercise put Loughborough College at the centre of an aircraft incident scenario involving 200 people at East Midlands Airport recently.
As ‘news’ came in that an aircraft had crashed on the runway, emergency services and teams at the international transit hub including police, paramedics and security were joined by Public Services and Performing Arts students from the College, role playing passenger casualties and relatives needing treatment and desperate for information.
“We were briefed ahead that we were just off the aircraft and our job was to follow specific instructions in presenting ourselves to the services in attendance as a variety of injured and distressed passengers,” said Tim Turner, Public Services lead at Loughborough College.
“Our students had learnt about this in lessons but the exercise exposed them to a completely different level of practical knowledge, enabling them to gain an excellent insight into the needs of people involved in major incidents and to see a range of service roles in action on the ground, being assessed on the vital skills they need in such scenarios.”
“It was incredibly realistic, relentless and very demanding but our students really rose to the challenge,” added Vicki Calvert-Gooch, Performing Arts lecturer at Loughborough College. “For several hours we were playing the relatives of passengers waiting for news of our loved ones, naturally becoming increasingly distraught as updates kept coming in on the emergency situation.
“Each of us had been given a character with a back story – for example, a parent who had left a young child with a neighbour or an older child unaccompanied at home as they only expected to be a short period of time. One of us was pregnant, another was having panic attacks, there were tears...
“The students were fantastic, never breaking their character once. They realised the importance of everything seeming as realistic as possible. This is crucial training for the emergency services and airport staff and it was great to be able to support that.”