Blazing Trails: Igniting Excellence at FESTI
It's not every day you'll see airside maintenance workers using special cranes to recover a stranded airplane from a ditch. For staff at the Fire and Emergency Services Training Institute (FESTI), however, it's far from unusual. This private career college owned and operated by the GTAA offers everything from firefighter training, bomb-squad training to the recent crane-enabled aircraft recovery exercise. FESTI facilities even double as a movie set! Here, FESTI Associate Director and Dean Kelly Holden tells us eight little-known facts about Toronto Pearson Airport's most high-octane school.
FESTI is the only facility of its kind in Canada
Started in 2007, FESTI is the only private career college run by an active fire department — Pearson's Fire and Emergency Services — and owned by an airport. Rather than having to travel for regular recertifications, Pearson firefighters take their specialized training and continuing education at FESTI. Tucked on the western edge of Pearson, it is minutes from the airport's fire stations, where they work.
Don’t be surprised if you see flames shooting out of a plane on these grounds
On FESTI's 40-acre training grounds, instructors stage everything from high-rise rescues in a building made from metal shipping containers to machine entanglement extractions. FESTI also owns a Boeing 737, an Embraer 175, and two mock-up fuselages. The planes can be filled with smoke to practice search and rescues or be placed in a ditch to train rescuers on moving them with big cranes, an extremely difficult exercise to pull off anywhere else. Flames can be added to the model fuselages using a state-of-the-art propane fire system operated by a control panel. "It's like if you turn your barbecue or gas stove on at home — the fire shoots up," says Holden. Firefighters then use specialized equipment like aircraft rescue firefighting (ARFF) trucks to extinguish the fire.
Sometimes you might hear a bomb blast, too.
FESTI's training facility is also used by the Canadian military, police department K-9 units and bomb technicians, production companies and even special operations teams for high level training. Clients sometimes bring in crisis actors, fake blood and artificial intestines to make an accident scene more real. A bomb-squad team even detonated a bomb in a car once.
They train hundreds of new and experienced firefighters each year.
FESTI conducts recertification training for firefighters from 23 airports in Canada and the Caribbean — and trains new firefighters, graduating about 350 annually. "Our pre-service firefighting program is for people who want to become firefighters and caters to a wide audience of students," says Holden. "Some are right out of high school while some are mature students looking for a change in career."
They give old 737s a new life.
Airlines frequently offer FESTI planes that have reached the end of their commercial life. "It turns out it's expensive to dispose of planes," says Holden. The planes arrive stripped of all their goodies. "Airlines take everything off that's worth any money, like the seats," Holden adds. FESTI then taps their contacts to refurbish the plane to create a realistic environment for firefighters. FESTI has also been gifted a cast-off CN Rail car, old dump trucks and cars, used augers and fire department tools and equipment — all of which are used for training.
FESTI instructors are in demand from the Arctic to the Caribbean
The school's instructors travel as far north as Nunavut and as far south as the Bahamas to train firefighters. FESTI instructors aren't operational firefighters, but they do provide support services when Pearson has a large-scale emergency, as they did when an Air France Airbus A340 overran a runway and slid into a ravine in 2005.
They host unconventional corporate team-building events.
FESTI offers companies a one-day retreat on putting out corporate fires. "Everyone has a fire, it just depends on what it is, and we often don't communicate our best when the stakes and stress are high," says Holden. Participants can take a morning workshop on communicating clearly under pressure and team-building strategies. Then they don firefighting gear, extinguish an actual fire and practice communication strategies and skills in a smoked-out aircraft and building. "It's really a team-building day."
More innovations are coming in 2024.
Next year, FESTI will get a new building constructed from freight containers that uses non-toxic theatrical smoke for training. "The building is multi-story with several areas for firefighter skill training, including high-angle rope training, medical scenarios, forcible entry, ladder operations, search and rescue and indoor auto extrication — all in one building," says Holden. "This is something we haven't found at other firefighting colleges." FESTI is also redesigning its fuselage mock-ups to expand their training uses. The new ones will have more capability to go inside and a lavatory that lights on fire. "It's pretty cool," says Holden.
