Dallas Love Field Puts the First All-Electric Crash Truck Through Its Paces

Airport crash trucks spend most of their lives waiting. They have to be ready to make the runway in minutes, but at a city airport they don't roll often, and every morning a crew starts each diesel to check it. Dallas Fire-Rescue Chief Justin Ball says that start-up is when most of the exhaust comes out.

"They don't make a lot of runs because they're at an airport, even though they have to be ready and capable, so with the diesel ones, our members come in every day, and obviously, they have to start the vehicle, and that's when the most issues for emissions come out – is when they start the vehicles," Ball told KRLD.

Since April 29, one of the trucks waiting at Dallas Love Field's Aircraft Rescue and Firefighting (ARFF) Station 21 has run on batteries. It is a Rosenbauer PANTHER 6x6 electric, which the city and the airport call the first all-electric ARFF vehicle in the world. Dallas Fire-Rescue (DFR) is running it through a six-month test before it joins the fleet as a regular operational vehicle.

Water, foam and 880 kilowatts

The Love Field truck is a pre-series unit; orders for the electric PANTHER have been open since October 2024. It weighs 91,000 pounds. Rosenbauer's delivery listing for the City of Dallas gives the rest, with drive output in kilowatts (kW):

The pump is fully electric. The city says the truck reaches 50 mph in under 15 seconds, against 28 seconds for its diesel crash trucks, and KRLD reported that DFR showed off the boost button at the unveiling.

"When it comes to airport firefighting, speed is a big issue," Ball said.

The city also says the master stream reaches 250 feet, up from 190 feet on the diesel rigs, and that the truck is about 50 percent quieter on a response. Officials told KRLD the lower noise helps crews talk to each other during an airport emergency.

"They would be able to, if need be, fight fire from more of a distance, which makes it safer for them," Ball said.

Charging and the backup engine

The batteries are sized, according to Rosenbauer, to cover the two- to three-minute run to an incident, discharge of the entire agent load and the drive back, in line with International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) and Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) response requirements. The truck accepts up to 300 kW of direct current (DC) charging and is ready again in under 20 minutes, the company says. If the batteries run low, an energy backup system takes over. Rosenbauer expects well over 90 percent of the truck's tasks to run on battery alone, and says it meets National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) 414 and 1900.

At the new Station 21, XCharge North America installed a 400 kW C7AM charger with liquid-cooled cables. The station opened on August 13. The 33,400-square-foot building houses both the ARFF station and airport operations, and the city calls it the second-largest ARFF station in Texas and the fourth-largest in the country.

"XCharge has provided a charging solution that not only supports our efforts to introduce the next generation of airport firefighting technology, but also ensures we are prepared to respond quickly and safely when duty calls," Ball said.

What the test has to show

When the partnership was announced in December 2024, the test was set up to look at how the truck fits into everyday operations, how it performs against the current fleet and how it works in training. Love Field handles almost 18 million passengers a year and averages 675 aircraft operations a day. The city's aviation department has set a target of zero emissions by 2040.

Ball doesn't pretend the test is a formality.

"Being the first, there is a risk with being the first in anything, because you've got the unknown," he said. "But we're willing to take that risk to be innovative."

The test window that opened in late April runs to about the end of October. For an ARFF chief weighing one of these, the useful results are how often the backup engine ran and how long the truck sat on the charger after drills and alarms through a Texas summer.