Kolkata, May 29 (PTI) A hot fire drill was conducted at the Kolkata airport on Thursday as part of its monthly emergency preparedness routine.

A hot fire drill is a full-scale emergency simulation where multiple agencies perform their designated roles as they would in a real-life aircraft emergency, the Airports Authority of India (AAI) said in a statement.

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These exercises are conducted to validate emergency response plans, improve inter-agency coordination, and enhance readiness across prevention, mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery phases, it said.

A total of 16 Aircraft Rescue and Fire Fighting (ARFF) and nine CISF personnel took part in the exercise, Kolkata airport director Pravat Ranjan Beuria said.

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The drill utilised two ARFF vehicles and two ambulances, with a mock aircraft crash staged within the premises to simulate a high-pressure emergency scenario.

The objective was to achieve the prescribed response time of 138 seconds from the initial alert and ensure the fire was brought under control within one minute -- a vital benchmark in aviation safety, Beuria said.

Continuous and rigorous training enables teams to meet these stringent goals efficiently, he said.

The drill was conducted in rainy conditions to check the response efficiency in adverse weather conditions.

The fire team took only 120 seconds to reach the site and extinguished the fire within one minute, thereby complying with international norms of response time and control time, which are 138 seconds and 1 minute, respectively, the statement said.

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