downtowncanyonville.com

Leave it to Louis Vuitton to make a so-bright-you-need-shades splash in the dreary moat of black nylon usually seen on luggage carousels around the world. The leather-goods company has recast its signature brown-and-beige checked Damier print—created in 1888—in fluorescent yellow and orange embossed leather. Say farewell to baggage mix-ups. Neon Yellow Damier Infini Keepall, $3,050, Louis Vuitton, 866-884-8866

—Meenal Mistry

A version of this article appeared April 6, 2013, on page D12 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Eye-Popping Packing.

Fires at airports are extremely rare, but the fire crews waiting have to know the ins and outs of airplanes and their complex systems. Scott McCartney joins Lunch Break with what airport firefighters have to know. Photo: Justin Clemons for The Wall Street Journal.

Grapevine, Texas

The double-decker hull of the Airbus A380 super jumbo jet erupted in flames at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport. Firefighter Jason Basaldua headed toward it in a giant crash truck and within seconds began blasting the front exit door with a massive shower.

“The goal is to provide a means of egress,” he said. “They might be all foamed up when we’re done, but they’ll be alive.”

The burning airplane hull is a $4 million steel training model of the A380, the largest passenger plane flying. It’s part of one of the foremost fire-training and research centers that draws airport firefighters from around the world. Fighting fires aboard airplanes has become an increasingly complex science as new airplanes present new challenges, through enormous size, new materials and large electrical systems that power major aircraft systems and fancy passenger entertainment.

That played out dramatically in Boston in January when a lithium-ion battery aboard a Japan Airlines

787 Dreamliner caught fire while on the ground. Before the 787 ever touched down in Boston, Logan Airport fire crews already knew the layout of the plane, its cockpit switches and where access doors were for passengers, cargo and electronics. Firefighters also had a plan for how they would fight lithium-battery fires, which are difficult because they flare up repeatedly. The fire was one of the events that led to the grounding of Boeing Co.’s

star product.

The firefighters knew all this because they had trained in webinars with Boeing’s fire department and with a 787 that visited Boston last year on a promotional tour.

“They were ready. They did their homework and I credit them with saving the hull of that airplane,” said Robert Donahue, Fire Rescue Department chief for the Massachusetts Port Authority, which operates Logan.

Airplanes burn quickly, especially if fires are fed by jet fuel from engines and ruptured tanks. But crashes have become more survivable, thanks largely to tougher safety standards that require seats capable of surviving major impact and slower-burning cabin materials.

Firefighting tactics and training have advanced, too. At the southwest corner of DFW’s immense property, which is larger than the island of Manhattan, the airport just completed a $29 million expansion of its training facility. More than $17 million was funded by the Federal Aviation Administration, and the agency says DFW is just one part of a large crash survival research effort. The center opened in 1995 and has trained fire crews from 29 states and 24 countries.

“We have changed accidents to be much more survivable,” a senior FAA official said.

Firefighters train to quickly reach cockpits, often through dense theatrical smoke, keeping one mantra in mind: “Throttles, Bottles, Batteries.” They must make sure throttles are pulled back so fuel isn’t flowing to engines, then pull handles to discharge fire-extinguishing bottles built into the plane, then turn off all batteries.

“They should be able to do it blindfolded,” DFW Battalion Chief Randall Rhodes said. On the training equipment, if a firefighter doesn’t get throttles, bottles and batteries correctly, a bell goes off and the training is repeated.

The DFW center includes a high-tech classroom with a wall-size touch screen where firefighters can walk through layouts of planes and familiarize themselves with seats, doors and cockpits. They encounter sudden combustion inside mock cabins, practicing ducking under flames to stay alive. The computer-controlled A380 mock-up, the only one in the U.S., is located in a fire pit so firefighters can simultaneously practice fighting fires outside and saving people inside.

The mock-up has steel seats in typical coach, business- and first-class layouts on both decks plus replicas of the 555-passenger jet’s staircases and cargo containers. It is so realistic that when a firefighter pulls the throttles back to idle in the cockpit, fire coming out of engines will lessen. Sensors measure when enough water has been applied to the fire to extinguish it. The fire, fed either by propane gas or E3 biofuel, which more closely simulates jet fuel but burns more cleanly, reacts to firefighters’ actions. Even though water is used in training, sensors react as though firefighters were using the foam they would use in a real emergency.

Among issues for firefighters: A standard 24-foot ladder isn’t enough to get on top of the wing of an A380, so should trucks carry 34-foot ladders that require extra manpower? What if booms on trucks can’t reach the top of the three-story cabin to break through and spray foam?

“Everything is twice as challenging on the A380,” said Alan Black, head of DFW’s Department of Public Safety.

DFW decided to ratchet up its fire training after the 1988 crash of Delta Air Lines

Flight 1141. It was the second deadly crash at the airport within a three-year period. Firefighters were able to help rescue 93 survivors. Fifteen people died and the aircraft was destroyed by impact and fire. “That was the moment we said we can do more than just spray water on those things,” said Mr. Black.

The training includes climbing in through wing exits with gear, getting into cargo holds and finding which container is burning, moving hoses through planes without snags, opening doors and cargo hatches without electrical power and searching and rescuing passengers. They are taught to look above and below seats and in lavatories and galleys, all the while watching the ceiling of the cabin to see if gasses are building that would create a flashover fire.

“This is the most realistic training you can get,” said Kelcey Land, a Texas-based firefighter for American Eurocopter Corp. He and colleague John Farrar practiced fighting a large engine fire on a recent windy day. Two pairs of firefighters, each pair with one hose, worked as one unit.

“You have to stay close together, the trainer reminded me. You don’t want fire to get between you,” said Mr. Farrar.

At Logan, firefighters on 24-hour shifts have three training modules to complete every day. Many days firefighters arrange with airlines to get access to particular planes to refresh familiarization, often with an airline mechanic.

On Jan. 7, two calls came in reporting smoke in the 787. A nearby fire crew training arrived in less than a minute. One firefighter ran up the jetway and saw heavy smoke in the cabin. He opened the jetway door so smoke wouldn’t travel into the terminal and began a search of the passenger cabin to make sure no one was aboard. Firefighters used hand-held thermal imaging cameras to find a softball-sized heat signature, according to Chief Donahue.

Heat inside the lithium-ion battery was so intense that firefighters could hear small explosions. Fire flared repeatedly. “We had some challenges extinguishing this thing,” Chief Donahue said.

Write to Scott McCartney at middleseat@wsj.com

A version of this article appeared March 21, 2013, on page D1 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Fighting Fire on the Runway.

By DOROTHY RABINOWITZ

Mad Men

Begins Sunday, April 7, at 9 p.m. on AMC.

The sixth season of “Mad Men” brings a whiff of the social change that made the ’60s famous—the counterculture has arrived, with people turning on and dropping out, and there’s the Vietnam War in the background. None of this—it’s a whiff after all—has anything much to do with the world of Don Draper and friends. All are reintroduced in a premiere episode that lumbers along, overpopulated, burdened by the weight of its ambitions, flattened by misbegotten detours—a long lugubrious to-do involving Roger Sterling (John Slattery) and his mother comes to mind—but one, nevertheless, that surges to life in the end.

“Mad Men” is back for its sixth season, and we can’t wait to ogle the glamorous up-dos on Betty, Megan and Sally. To get big hair that’s perfect for a glamorous night out, Wall Street Journal Reporter Elizabeth Holmes headed to Salon Ziba in New York City.

That’s largely due to the enduring mystique that surrounds Don Draper. Changes are now evident in the Drapers’ marriage.The alluring Megan (Jessica Paré) has come into her own as a working actress—she’s still a life force of sorts alongside Don, but now a cloying one who has, in season six, blossomed into an inveterate babbler. Most of the first half-hour of Sunday’s premiere finds Don locked into a deep silence while Megan jabbers on. The happy couple is vacationing in Hawaii, where Megan chatters about getting too tanned while Don reads a copy of Dante’s “Inferno,” given him, it will later be revealed, by a new person of interest. As Megan rattles on in their grand suite at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, Don looks at her appraisingly—as a kind of alien presence.

In truth, Jon Hamm’s Don has never been better, doing here what he’s always done best for “Mad Men”—which is to sit back wordless, awash in inner judgments given no voice, while looking altogether irresistible. We can feel him registering Megan’s vacuous chatter—the more she talks, the more interesting his look becomes. But he listens. He’s become the indulgent husband of a dazzling woman who is looking ever more superficial. Not for nothing has Don been given that copy of Dante to carry around.

There is something intriguing in the show’s tendency to portray beautiful women as lacking in depth. What passes for substance in females is strictly limited to workaday types, women distinctly unstylish, sweet looking enough, perhaps, but no head-turners. Women, in short, like the talented and ambitious Peggy Olson (Elisabeth Moss). The moral of this story—or, more precisely, of this kind of casting—is perfectly in keeping with the clichés of every age as regards women, not just the era “Mad Men” has taken up.

This season sees the return of Betty (January Jones), Don’s troubled, unfathomably distant, and gorgeous former wife, now remarried. This beauty has undergone a transformation of her own that impels her to social action, a kind that sends her hunting through the drug-ridden precincts of 1960s Manhattan in search of a teenage friend of her daughter. A dauntless activist now, she goes barging into squalid hallways occupied by rats to find the tenement apartment where she thinks the girl may be staying. Betty, it’s clear, is becoming a woman of substance in the show. It can’t be surprising, then, that she proceeds to choose a dramatic change in her appearance—a kind designed to reduce her glamour and add seriousness. Betty’s creators are only hearkening to their rules: Women of substance don’t have glamour.

As ever in “Mad Men,” the workplace is the vital center for drama. The outstanding scene of the season’s first two hours shows Don holding forth on his new ad campaign for the Royal Hawaiian Hotel—a wonderful comic spectacle in which a confident Don explains the theme, titled “Hawaii, The Jumping Off Point,” an idea he treasures for its artful subtlety. And one, also, that suggests death—whether by suicide, or dropping off the world—which quickly becomes clear to everyone but Don. But where, the cringing hotel men want to know, is the picture of the hotel, or Diamond Head? Anybody can give that to you, the puzzled Don tells them in this—one of the rare moments of real satire to be found in “Mad Men.” A creation, it’s safe to predict, likely to keep rolling along reliably—and in one way or another compellingly—to the end of its run.

HBO

A photograph from ’50 Children: The Rescue Mission of Mr. & Mrs. Kraus.’

50 Children: The Rescue Mission of Mr. & Mrs. Kraus

Monday, April 8, at 9 p.m. on HBO

As its subtitle indicates, “50 Children” was an intensely personal rescue mission conceived by Gilbert Kraus, a Philadelphia attorney, and his wife, Eleanor, an ardent partner in his cause, which was to save the lives of Jewish children facing annihilation. Gilbert decided, in 1939, that the site of his action should be Austria, whose citizens had welcomed the German army with wild enthusiasm and who had, indeed, joined in the orgy of beatings and killings during the Kristallnacht riots against Jews, with more appetite for brutality than had been seen in Germany.

The film—narrated by Alan Alda, with Mamie Gummer reading from Mrs. Kraus’s memoir—reveals a couple admirably modest about themselves, heedless of the danger they faced as Jews going to Nazi-occupied Vienna, and utterly intransigent in their will to bring 50 children out to safety. The film can be faulted for its simple-minded view of Franklin Roosevelt as responsible for the failure to pass a bill that would have permitted thousands of Jewish children to enter the U.S. FDR can be faulted for putting up no fight for the bill in his effort to keep the isolationists under control—but it was the U.S. Congress, bitterly and openly determined to bar any such immigration, that killed all hope for the measure. The film is, to its credit, entirely frank about the hostility to the Krauses’ project on the part of American Jews worried about the trouble it might cause them. All this Mr. and Mrs. Kraus ignored as they went forward to their task, intimately and memorably detailed here.

—D.R.

HBO

A scene from ‘Vice.’

Vice

Begins Friday, April 5, at 11 p.m. on HBO

A word on “Vice,” a news magazine whose correspondents report on dangerous places. Most chilling by far—and not to be missed—are the up-close interviews with children in Afghanistan, innocent and ignorant, who reveal how they were persuaded to become suicide bombers. The Taliban told them, they reveal, that the explosives are rigged so that they will only kill the enemy, not the carrier of the bomb.

—D.R.

A version of this article appeared April 5, 2013, on page D8 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Don Draper’s Inferno.

A show during New York Fashion Week is perceived as a pinnacle of success for an American designer. Yet, as WSJ On Style columnist Christina Binkley reports on Lunch Break, when Fashion Week opens Feb. 7, a number of labels will have dropped off the calendar. Photo: Getty Images.

New York Fashion Week has long been perceived as a pinnacle of success for an American designer. Yet when fashion week opens Feb. 7, a number of labels that showed there in the past will be sitting it out.

Joy Cioci will instead present her collection in mid-March after editors and buyers return from Paris Fashion Week, the last event in the monthlong round of collections. The New York calendar “was so crowded, and it’s so hectic for buyers and the editors, she says of the four seasons she showed at the fashion-week tents. “I just felt that I wasn’t getting the investment return.”

Yoana Baraschi, whose 10-year-old label showed at fashion week for many seasons, will also move to mid-March. Her presentation, she says, will be more intimate, and she will be able to hire high-caliber talent that is usually booked during fashion week.

“Everybody wants the same models and the same stylists. It’s just spinning out of control,” Ms. Baraschi says of the official week. “No one can see as many shows as there are now.”

New York’s calendar has become noticeably more crowded as labels squeeze in with entrepreneurial zeal. While fashion shows used to be limited to high-style labels, midprice contemporary labels and menswear brands are now muscling into New York. One reason: No official body controls the calendar, unlike in Milan and Paris, where just a few dozen labels are invited to show in each fashion week. So far, 283 labels have registered to present collections at New York Fashion Week, up from 204 in Feb. 2007, according to the Fashion Calendar, a company that tracks fashion events.

Giorgio Niro

Yoana Baraschi

While the official calendar runs Thursday to Thursday from Feb. 7-14, designers actually will start showing as early as Monday, Feb. 4, turning the “week” into 11 days.

There are hourly collisions on the busiest days. At 4 p.m. Monday, four labels are showing in various locations around New York. At 8 p.m. Sunday, editors must choose between seeing Tommy Hilfiger and Ralph Rucci. And after seeing 10 or more collections a day, most viewers have to look at photos to bring the blur of clothes back into focus.

“I need memory retention. I need a chance to sit and talk to these people,” says designer Daniel Vosovic, who is moving his three-year-old label to a March presentation as well.

Often, it is cheaper to circumvent New York Fashion Week. Mackage designers Elisa Dahan and Eran Elfassy found it less expensive to fly editors to their show at Toronto Fashion Week. They launched Montreal-based Mackage in New York in 1999—but started showing in Toronto last year. “I feel like we were little kids trying to accomplish a dream,” Ms. Dahan says of those early shows. But in Toronto, she says, they can hire top models who are contractually forbidden to do their shows in New York because of agreements with more powerful brands.

The cost of a show during New York Fashion Week is generally six figures and can rise to more than $1 million for big brands. If you hire top models, the minimum cost of a show is $350,000, says Ms. Baraschi, who estimates she will save 60% of the cost by moving to March.

Many designers are creating carefully produced videos of their collections. Rather than limiting their audience to the people at the show, they can send the video to stores and editors, use it for advertising and put it on YouTube and style.com. “It has longevity,” Ms. Cioci says.

Designers who forsake New York’s fashion week still plan to keep their showrooms open to take orders from store buyers during the week, just as they have in the past.

The split highlights the increasing separation between store buyers and fashion editors. Shows, with their pomp and drama, are increasingly focused on marketing to magazine editors. As designers try to accommodate the growing number of celebrities and bloggers, stores have been crowded out. While top fashion executives at big department stores such as Saks and Neiman Marcus still get invitations, they aren’t always in the front rows. And smaller store buyers sometimes struggle to obtain invitations at all.

The chaos is a natural part of a fast-changing industry, says Tom Florio, former publisher of Vogue, who recently took over as CEO of Advanstar Fashion group, which runs eight fashion trade shows. Mr. Florio’s new shows, which seek to get higher fashion into the trade-show environment, aim to lure New York Fashion Week regulars. One show called “The Tents” will launch later this month in Las Vegas, inviting trendy menswear labels such as Billy Reid and Michael Bastian to participate. “There are so many ways to communicate fashion today,” says Mr. Florio. “You don’t necessarily have to tell that story on the runway anymore.

None of this diminishes many designers’ aspirations to reach New York fashion week. To launch her new ready-to-wear Rivini line during fashion week, bridal designer Rita Vinieris started looking for open times in October. “The calendar is insanely crowded,” she says. She settled on Feb. 6, a day before official fashion week. She hopes to reach editors who miss her presentation with a video and private appointments.

Nary Manivong, whose label will be showed to editors by appointment in March, says he is sanguine about skipping New York Fashion Week. “For me, fashion week will always be there. I can always come back.”

Write to Christina Binkley at christina.binkley@wsj.com

Corrections & Amplifications

The name of the fashion label that designer Nary Manivong will show in March is Nary Manivong. An earlier version of this article incorrectly called the label NAHM.

A version of this article appeared January 23, 2013, on page D3 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Why Some Labels Will Sidestep Fashion Week.

When news broke last week that more than 60 diners at Noma, a Copenhagen restaurant, had contracted norovirus and fallen ill in February, many resulting articles called Noma “the world’s best restaurant.”

That is based on a relatively new measure of gastronomic greatness, and it isn’t a unanimous opinion. The ranking, the annual World’s 50 Best Restaurants list, is based on votes by over 900 judges, including chefs, food writers and food lovers at large, who try to defy the cliché and give an accounting for taste.

Started in 2002, the ranking has risen from a feature idea in a U.K. trade publication to an industry award show covered world-wide. Yet critics say the rankings are susceptible to lobbying and to comping of meals by contending restaurants. And more-populist voting, such as on the international travel website TripAdvisor, doesn’t always agree with the results. Noma ranks ninth on TripAdvisor—in Copenhagen. The top spot in the city is an ice-cream shop called Ismageriet.

The World’s 50 Best rankings are both influential—driving more interest in a restaurant than a Michelin star or a major review, say some owners—and inherently imperfect.

“It is really the only ranking or rating that gets global attention from the media all over the world,” said Nick Kokonas, co-owner of Alinea, a Chicago restaurant that ranks seventh in the world and second in the U.S., behind Per Se in New York. Being named best restaurant in North America in 2010 drove more visits to Alinea’s website than an appearance by Alinea’s chef on Oprah Winfrey‘s television show.

But Mr. Kokonas said the list is tilted against restaurants outside the world’s most-visited cities, which could favor New York and London spots over Alinea, and give Alinea, in turn, an advantage over the best restaurant in Denver.

Restaurant Magazine, which runs the rankings, appoints 26 regional chairs—including 10 in Europe and Turkey and three in the U.S. and Canada—who each appoint 35 judges. Each judge votes for seven restaurants, ranked by preference, at least three of which must be outside his or her region and none of which can be places the judge has a financial interest in. A judge must have dined in all seven choices in the last 18 months. Places are ranked by how many votes they get, with judges’ rankings used only to break ties. So a famous spot visited by every judge but voted for by 100 would beat a place visited by 90 judges and ranked first by all 90.

Asked if that favors eateries that are visited more frequently—those in big cities, for example—William Drew, editor of Restaurant Magazine, said, “inevitably.” But he said some places outside cities, such as Manresa in Los Gatos, Calif.—No. 48 last year—make the cut.

Rankings based on anonymous online votes, such as those on TripAdvisor, also raise doubts. One is that voters aren’t playing fair—either by voting more than once or by rating their own restaurant up while voting down a competitor. “TripAdvisor has a zero-tolerance policy for fraudulent reviews,” a spokeswoman said.

A different risk surrounds the World’s 50 Best ranking: that voters are being influenced by complimentary meals. Jay Rayner, restaurant critic for the Observer newspaper in the U.K., said he quit as regional chair because of what he saw as unchecked offers of free meals from restaurants in a bid to boost their rankings. Mr. Rayner argued that votes based on comped meals should count less. But organizers disagreed. “Journalists will frequently get invited for free meals, and so will fellow chefs,” said Mr. Drew. “We can’t stop those.”

Raymond Lim, director of the Les Amis Group in Singapore and a judge for the contest, said another problem is some countries, such as mainland China, are too hard to cover for any one of their restaurants to get on the list.

The top restaurant for three years running is in Copenhagen. Judging for the next awards, to be announced next month, closed late last year so the norovirus outbreak won’t be held against Noma. The restaurant said that the bug was spread by an asymptomatic worker, that its staff has extensively cleaned the kitchen, and that it has offered refunds or new meals to affected diners.

Noma said it doesn’t regard the ranking as necessarily accurate. “We have never considered ourselves the ‘best restaurant in the world,’ ” said spokeswoman Annika de Las Heras, though the interest from the awards meant that “we have been allowed to create the restaurant of our dreams.”

Mr. Rayner also played down the ranking. “It was just a list and everyone loves lists,” he said. “You could pull it apart left, right and center easily, because it was merely a way of taking opinion.”

—Learn more about this topic at WSJ.com/NumbersGuy. Email numbersguy@wsj.com.

A version of this article appeared March 16, 2013, on page A2 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Rankings That May Give You Little to Chew On.

Fires at airports are extremely rare, but the fire crews waiting have to know the ins and outs of airplanes and their complex systems. Scott McCartney joins Lunch Break with what airport firefighters have to know. Photo: Justin Clemons for The Wall Street Journal.

Grapevine, Texas

The double-decker hull of the Airbus A380 super jumbo jet erupted in flames at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport. Firefighter Jason Basaldua headed toward it in a giant crash truck and within seconds began blasting the front exit door with a massive shower.

“The goal is to provide a means of egress,” he said. “They might be all foamed up when we’re done, but they’ll be alive.”

The burning airplane hull is a $4 million steel training model of the A380, the largest passenger plane flying. It’s part of one of the foremost fire-training and research centers that draws airport firefighters from around the world. Fighting fires aboard airplanes has become an increasingly complex science as new airplanes present new challenges, through enormous size, new materials and large electrical systems that power major aircraft systems and fancy passenger entertainment.

That played out dramatically in Boston in January when a lithium-ion battery aboard a Japan Airlines

787 Dreamliner caught fire while on the ground. Before the 787 ever touched down in Boston, Logan Airport fire crews already knew the layout of the plane, its cockpit switches and where access doors were for passengers, cargo and electronics. Firefighters also had a plan for how they would fight lithium-battery fires, which are difficult because they flare up repeatedly. The fire was one of the events that led to the grounding of Boeing Co.’s

star product.

The firefighters knew all this because they had trained in webinars with Boeing’s fire department and with a 787 that visited Boston last year on a promotional tour.

“They were ready. They did their homework and I credit them with saving the hull of that airplane,” said Robert Donahue, Fire Rescue Department chief for the Massachusetts Port Authority, which operates Logan.

Airplanes burn quickly, especially if fires are fed by jet fuel from engines and ruptured tanks. But crashes have become more survivable, thanks largely to tougher safety standards that require seats capable of surviving major impact and slower-burning cabin materials.

Firefighting tactics and training have advanced, too. At the southwest corner of DFW’s immense property, which is larger than the island of Manhattan, the airport just completed a $29 million expansion of its training facility. More than $17 million was funded by the Federal Aviation Administration, and the agency says DFW is just one part of a large crash survival research effort. The center opened in 1995 and has trained fire crews from 29 states and 24 countries.

“We have changed accidents to be much more survivable,” a senior FAA official said.

Firefighters train to quickly reach cockpits, often through dense theatrical smoke, keeping one mantra in mind: “Throttles, Bottles, Batteries.” They must make sure throttles are pulled back so fuel isn’t flowing to engines, then pull handles to discharge fire-extinguishing bottles built into the plane, then turn off all batteries.

“They should be able to do it blindfolded,” DFW Battalion Chief Randall Rhodes said. On the training equipment, if a firefighter doesn’t get throttles, bottles and batteries correctly, a bell goes off and the training is repeated.

The DFW center includes a high-tech classroom with a wall-size touch screen where firefighters can walk through layouts of planes and familiarize themselves with seats, doors and cockpits. They encounter sudden combustion inside mock cabins, practicing ducking under flames to stay alive. The computer-controlled A380 mock-up, the only one in the U.S., is located in a fire pit so firefighters can simultaneously practice fighting fires outside and saving people inside.

The mock-up has steel seats in typical coach, business- and first-class layouts on both decks plus replicas of the 555-passenger jet’s staircases and cargo containers. It is so realistic that when a firefighter pulls the throttles back to idle in the cockpit, fire coming out of engines will lessen. Sensors measure when enough water has been applied to the fire to extinguish it. The fire, fed either by propane gas or E3 biofuel, which more closely simulates jet fuel but burns more cleanly, reacts to firefighters’ actions. Even though water is used in training, sensors react as though firefighters were using the foam they would use in a real emergency.

Among issues for firefighters: A standard 24-foot ladder isn’t enough to get on top of the wing of an A380, so should trucks carry 34-foot ladders that require extra manpower? What if booms on trucks can’t reach the top of the three-story cabin to break through and spray foam?

“Everything is twice as challenging on the A380,” said Alan Black, head of DFW’s Department of Public Safety.

DFW decided to ratchet up its fire training after the 1988 crash of Delta Air Lines

Flight 1141. It was the second deadly crash at the airport within a three-year period. Firefighters were able to help rescue 93 survivors. Fifteen people died and the aircraft was destroyed by impact and fire. “That was the moment we said we can do more than just spray water on those things,” said Mr. Black.

The training includes climbing in through wing exits with gear, getting into cargo holds and finding which container is burning, moving hoses through planes without snags, opening doors and cargo hatches without electrical power and searching and rescuing passengers. They are taught to look above and below seats and in lavatories and galleys, all the while watching the ceiling of the cabin to see if gasses are building that would create a flashover fire.

“This is the most realistic training you can get,” said Kelcey Land, a Texas-based firefighter for American Eurocopter Corp. He and colleague John Farrar practiced fighting a large engine fire on a recent windy day. Two pairs of firefighters, each pair with one hose, worked as one unit.

“You have to stay close together, the trainer reminded me. You don’t want fire to get between you,” said Mr. Farrar.

At Logan, firefighters on 24-hour shifts have three training modules to complete every day. Many days firefighters arrange with airlines to get access to particular planes to refresh familiarization, often with an airline mechanic.

On Jan. 7, two calls came in reporting smoke in the 787. A nearby fire crew training arrived in less than a minute. One firefighter ran up the jetway and saw heavy smoke in the cabin. He opened the jetway door so smoke wouldn’t travel into the terminal and began a search of the passenger cabin to make sure no one was aboard. Firefighters used hand-held thermal imaging cameras to find a softball-sized heat signature, according to Chief Donahue.

Heat inside the lithium-ion battery was so intense that firefighters could hear small explosions. Fire flared repeatedly. “We had some challenges extinguishing this thing,” Chief Donahue said.

Write to Scott McCartney at middleseat@wsj.com

A version of this article appeared March 21, 2013, on page D1 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Fighting Fire on the Runway.