[SOUND] I'm here with Steve Wanzek. This man is fantastic. He's been an aviation professor, he's been active duty Air Force. He was a pilot in Vietnam, he helped take care of President Reagan, and now he is the manager of our airport. CMI, the University of Illinois' commercial airport. He's been nice enough to be able to show us around today, so we can find out, what are the inner workings of an actual commercial airport? Our first stop is at the Crash Rescue Fire Station, I guess most people would call it, but we aren't a typical fire department. Our fire marshall over here is John Regal. Hey, John. >> You two work for that. >> Okay, good to see you. >> Nice to see you. >> Thank you, right, so you have some fancy equipment that you hope you never have to use. >> Never have to use. >> All right, there's a lot of training and upkeep on the vehicles, but we don't want any disaster. >> Excellent, excellent. Hey, well, let's go see it. >> Well, this truck is a 2003 Oshkosh Striker. >> Oshkosh Striker. >> Oshkosh from- >> The famous air show that they have at Oshkosh all the time, right? >> It's right next to the airport, yeah. It's an Oshkosh Striker 1500 model. It's got 1500 gallons of water, and that tank would be in this panel that has our name on it. >> Okay. >> AI has 210 gallons of 3% foam, so we can mix that together, aerate it, and we can discharge it from the turrets and handlines on the front of the truck. >> Right, can we go see the guns? >> Sure. >> Okay, this is like a military vehicle, but it shoots out antifire stuff. >> Wow. >> Yeah, and it looks so cool. >> Yeah. >> Good. >> Yeah. >> So in front of the truck, we've got a roof and a bumper. This one is a special. It's three agent. So we've got water, foam, and then dry Chemical capabilities on the front in this tip here. >> If that's in case there's the gasoline, you put the dry chemical on it or you put the foam on it? >> Sure. Aircraft have got a lot of aviation fuel on board so that's what we're mainly dealing with fire wise. >> Okay. >> This particular turret will also have the ability to drop down about 18 inches off the ground so we have a better opportunity of sweeping at the base of a fire. And, you can almost see underneath, it's got a couple of under-truck nozzles. So, if we have the need to drive across any areas that are still involved in fire, we can douse them as we go. >> Wow. Wow. You can, like, walk on fire. >> Yeah. Another cool feature about this truck is the infrared camera, up on top. In times that in climate weather or darkness we have the ability to see heat with that. So we can find people, they're walking around or spot fire if we have heavy fall of the rain. >> Okay >> Have you had to use this. >> Well we've use the, we average maybe. Maybe a dozen or so calls out of here in a year but that's general aviation and commercial air traffic gets anything from indicator light that won't come down to a little smoke in the cock pit kind of thing. >> OK. >> We've not had a serious crash in June. At least 10, 12 years here at the airport. So it's been longer than that, I think. >> Good, good, good. That's great, because I fly out of here all the time. >> [LAUGH] >> I like the safety record, all right. [LAUGH] >> Yeah, flying's still one of the safest ways to get around, you bet. >> Absolutely. >> This particular truck we can operate with just a crew of one. >> Wow. >> It's joystick controls, just like you'd find at home on your video game. >> [LAUGH] >> and triggers and thumb controls to operate any of the engines you want or select the pattern you want out of the torrent. >> Wow that's a big expensive video game. Let me just ask how much does, I mean this is awesome you need this. Right? I mean you have to make sure that if there is some crash or something you want to save everyone. You have to have fire out, you want to be able to do it day or night. And obviously that's going to cost something. So how much was this car. this particular truck back in O three was in the neighborhood of six hundred and twenty five thousand I believe. That was fully equipped with hand tools and air packs and things. Throw in a few extras. Yeah. They threw them in. [LAUGH] Yeah and then you know it Meets all kinds of FAA specifications as far as the grade it can drive on and an incline, and then speed ratings as well. So, for a big old truck, it'll get up and go. >> Wow. [SOUND] The truck you do not want to see coming up to your airplane. [SOUND] [SOUND] [NOISE] [SOUND] So are these hangars big enough for The commercial jets that come in? >> The regional jets. >> Regional jets, okay. >> They're relatively small. They're in this hangar, which is hangar three. And they got four of them overnight. Well three now, but they can do four overnight. >> Four overnight. Now, there used to be, I remember being here and there were I thought they were 727's. >> Yeah, we bring in charter stuff. >> Okay. >> [INAUDIBLE] >> Back there was Piedmont Air. >> [INAUDIBLE] >> Yeah. >> Way back, that was before me. >> Before you, all right, all right, I've been here too long. That was when that was the terminal Exactly. Yeah. All right. Well, this is the flight star maintenance hangar- >> Okay. >> And as you can, they're doing- >> Man. Look at that. >> Either scheduled or Routine maintenance on So, I remember this from when I was flying with my dad, but if you notice on the runway or on this taxiway, is that yellow, that double yellow line and the black, and you never cross those lines until the tower says you can. So how long is this runway? >> This is a 6,500 foot runway. >> Wow, over a mile long on this runway. >> Yeah, the longest runway we have is 8,000 feet. >> Wow. And the 2-2 is the compass heading? >> It's, 2-2-0. So a runway gets its designation from the compass heading rounded off to the nearest tenth. Planes probably first touch down, right? >> Right. [INAUDIBLE] >> With a shared baggage claim, in fact everything's shared now. Behind the ticket counter is what used to be a baggage makeup area, where each airline would have its own area where they would bring a cart in Go on an individual bag belt back and then they would take it out to the airport. Well now the TSA has to check all the bags so we have a common screening area for bags. Common pick up area. They're taken out and then they're returned here. The tug in the bag [INAUDIBLE] this device. You drive in here, and this thing just goes and, it's kind of, there's nothing special. You've seen this on the other side. It's just, this is what it looks like here. So, we have all of the national I think we actually have I think 7 or 8 if you count the ones that are double booked behind the counter. >> This device has really been pretty amazing to me. It used to be after 9/11 until we got this that they had to literally go through every bag. Now this the sensor, I would love to know how the software does all this but, somehow they can clear ninety five percent of the bags without having to open. But there are certain things including the bad stuff I mean if you've got something that's potentially An explosive device or something it can't identify. It's going to trigger it and alert the operator. Then they have to hand clear it. But they got a chance to look at the screen image first and then determine whether it could be clear just by looking at it or whether So they actually have to open them. But things like peanut butter, which is perfectly legal to ship, or honey, something like that, that will trigger it and every time your bags will get searched if you have that. But 95% of the bags never get opened now as a result of having a machine like this. The jet bridge is. On two and three, this is Jet Bridge four, are the new ones that we did three or four years ago, whatever that was. This one used to be on Jet Bridge two, and as a part of the process, this was the best of the three bridges that we had. We moved it over here and then sent the scrap the other [SOUND]
