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The ARFF Summit at FDIC International runs April 21–22 in Indianapolis, and the Westnet team will be there.
Now in its third year as a dedicated event within FDIC week, the ARFF Summit brings together ARFF Chiefs, airport operations directors, and aviation fire service leadership from airports of every category: A, B, and C level. The format is focused: two days of sessions on aviation fire protection, ARFF operations, airport and community emergency planning, and peer-level exchange between professionals managing the same operational challenges.
It's the right room for the conversations happening in aircraft emergency response right now.
What ARFF leadership is working through
The agenda at events like this reflects what's actually happening in the field. Across airports, ARFF leadership is working through a consistent set of overlapping challenges: notification chains that depend on manual crash phone procedures, multi-agency coordination that breaks down under pressure, and documentation gaps that only become visible during an FAA audit or post-incident review.
FAA Part 139 requires documented, rapid notification of all responding agencies the moment an aircraft emergency is declared. The crash phone call chain, where ATC contacts fire, then police, then medical sequentially, wasn't designed to meet that standard under real-world stress. It introduces variable delays, creates inconsistency between shifts, and leaves no automatic record.
The gap between what the regulation requires and what manual procedures reliably deliver is what drives the ARFF community toward modernization. The conversations at the ARFF Summit tend to surface that gap clearly.
The notification problem the ARFF community is solving
Single-touch, simultaneous multi-agency alerting isn't a new concept. It's a documented operational need. When an emergency is declared, every second the crash phone call chain adds to the notification process is a second ARFF crews aren't moving.
Westnet AES replaces the call chain with a single touchscreen action. Every responding agency (fire, police, medical, airport operations) receives the alert simultaneously, with key incident data, in under a second. The controller is back on the aircraft. The record is already captured.
That's the shift the ARFF Summit audience is evaluating. Not whether to modernize, but which path gets there.
Connect with Westnet during ARFF Summit week
The ARFF Summit runs April 21–22 at the Indiana Convention Center, within FDIC International week (April 20–25). Westnet will have a tabletop at the summit with a live demo of the AES product. If you want to see how simultaneous multi-agency alerting works in practice, this is the place to do it.
The Westnet team will also be on the main FDIC show floor at Booth 3038 throughout exhibit days (April 23–25).
If you're attending the summit and want to talk through aircraft emergency notification, whether you're early in evaluation or further along, reach out to schedule time.
Summit details and registration are available at fdic.com/arff-summit. For the full list of events where you can connect with the Westnet team, visit our industry events page.
