Plane crash disaster training prepares EMS at Columbia Regional Airport
Haley Swaino
COLUMBIA, Mo. (KMIZ)
Firefighters and medics used a bus to simulate a plane with injured passengers during a drill Monday at Columbia Regional Airport.
The triennial training allows emergency personnel to respond to a simulated plane crash.
A Go COMO Transit bus simulating an aircraft arrived on the COU tarmac Monday morning carrying dozens of volunteer crash victims. Some had special makeup done to resemble their assigned injuries.
“There’s a lot going on when we get called to these incidents,” Columbia Fire Department Capt. Wayne Cummins said. “Obviously, we have to peel back all the layers once we get here and figure out where the priorities are. And once we get all the agencies working together, it gets organized pretty quick.”
“Victims” treated the simulation like a real emergency by acting as if they had broken bones or were dead. During the exercise, emergency responders triaged patients based on their simulated injuries.
“We have maybe people that were not injured that were able to walk away from the scene, all the way to the practice of dealing with a fatality of a disaster,” Airport Manager Mike Parks said. “So we take it all the way through that scenario for them (emergency responders) to practice with their triage.”
Some victims were taken away by ambulances back to the airport parking lot, some boarded into an MU Health Care EMS helicopter that did not fly them away from the scene.
“What the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) requires is we try to get as close as we can to the number of volunteers that we would have for the average aircraft that’s used at the airport,” Parks said. “That way, it ensures that we have enough victims to be able to practice with all emergency responders.”
The FAA requires airport’s complete the full-scale emergency exercise every three years to maintain certification.
Parks said while conducting the exercise allows emergency service partners to collaborate in-person, it is not the only time the community discusses emergency preparedness at the airport.
“We’re always communicating,” Parks said. “We always have annual discussions about emergencies and how we would respond.”
The City of Columbia partnered with the Boone County Office of Emergency Management, local law enforcement and fire department agencies, health care providers and the Salvation Army for Monday’s exercise. Emergency responders arrived on the simulated scene in staggered times, as they would during a real emergency.
“We don’t want people driving all the way from Columbia or down in the southern part of the county out here,” Parks said. “So what we do is we stage the emergency responders in a nearby parking lot and then we time it out with a simulated response time from their agency’s headquarters.”
Cummins said the way the exercise is set up helps agencies maintain a sense of accuracy on what response to a Columbia air crash would look like.
“The order of arrival, the dispatch, how we handle the objectives on the scene were very much realistic,” Cummins said.
Initial units set up and organized the command’s response to the scene. Cummins said it takes a lot to come together and assess a scene of this nature, so being prepared is key.
“It was a good opportunity for us (all agencies) to train together and operate together under these conditions,” Cummins said.
All agencies closed out the exercise with a private after-action discussion.
“We’re going to go over everything that went on out there today, the goods, the bads, things that could have been better,” Cummins said. “And we’re going to collaborate together, all agencies, to discuss that and make sure that, God forbid this happened for real, that we could be better prepared and ready to do it if we really have to.”
According to data from the National Transportation Safety Board, there have been at least 250 U.S. aviation incidents in the first quarter of 2025 alone, 37 of which were fatal.
In Mid-Missouri, private aircraft crashes are far more common than commercial plane crashes. The last crash at COU was in July 2011, when the pilot of a small plane couldn’t get his plane’s landing gear down. He was not hurt.
The last deadly crash in Columbia happened in September 2009 when a pilot of a small plane crashed just after takeoff in bad weather.
April 16 marked the one-year anniversary of a deadly plane crash in southern Boone County.
It is also nearing the first anniversary of a May plane crash that happened near the Butler Memorial Airport in Butler, Missouri. Six people were forced to parachute out of the small plane.
A deadly mid-air collision in Virginia in January involved an American Airlines passenger plane and a Black Hawk military helicopter near the Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.
The same model of airplane involved in the crash — CRJ 700s — fly in and out of the Columbia Regional Airport. American Airlines CRJ 700 planes are used for some flights by Skywest between Columbia and Dallas.