The wounded are everywhere—young and old, with terrible burns on their faces, blood streaming from holes made by shrapnel, leg lacerations studded with what look like airplane parts. A young man in a blood-stained white T-shirt, with horrific facial burns, strolls past me. Yet, despite these terrible injuries, everyone's smiling and chatting, gulping down coffee and gobbling the danishes laid out on trestle tables in a white tent.

This gathering of zombies looks more like the Thriller wrap party than the end of the world.

That's because we're all participants in a disaster training and assessment exercise for the first responders who work at the airport and the neighboring district. We're about 60 people in all, some locals with a free Wednesday morning and a bunch of EMT trainees who get class credit for agreeing to a gruesome makeover. We're each assigned some level of injury. I'm told I'll be one of the lucky ones.

Before the "explosion," which will happen at 9 am and start the test for real (and after a safety briefing), we file into the old MD-80 fuselage that gets trailered from airport to airport for such exercises. The wings are gone but the seats and overhead lockers remain, and today it's sitting in a far corner of the airport, off one end of the runway.

“We activate as much as we possibly can without shutting down the airport,” says Michael Crane, assistant manager for operations at Burbank Airport. (Passengers in the terminal and approaching pilots are warned there’s a drill going on.) That's why all the prep work happens through a gate from the employee parking lot, where a pair of moulage artists pull latex wounds from ziplock bags and fix them to various body parts with plenty of adhesive.

“With fatalities, we’re leaving the body where it’s at. They're part of the investigation."

We board open-seating, Southwest style, and I snag a first-class window seat, overlooking the nacelle which is simulating our broken engine, about 20 feet away. After the door is closed, we wait for few minutes, nervously joking about getting free drinks, before someone calls out they see fire. I look at the nacelle just as the cans of pyrotechnics around it explode. After a quick series of four or five muffled bangs yields thick clouds of white smoke outside, I'm no longer sure what’s happening. Everyone is craning around the windows for a look. They seem more excited than scared.

“I think we’re supposed to panic,” says a lady in a nearby seat, joking. She's actually been told she's one of the dead, whereas I, in the row behind, will come off relatively unscathed. Once guy cries that he promises to be a better dad if he just gets out alive (he knows he will). The passengers are remarkably calm, and the smoke and fire are kept safely contained. But in a real plane fire, the cabin would have started filling with thick smoke. (That’s why it’s crucial to count how many rows you are from the exits when you sit down; you might need to find them later in the dark.)

Soon the airport’s fire trucks scream onto the scene and the firefighters get to work hitting the flames with water and foam. It feels like being in a very loud, very big car wash. A firefighter in a full yellow respirator suit appears at the front of the cabin, breathing like Darth Vader. He walks down the aisle, shouting “Can you walk?” People who've been given walking-wounded roles are urged off the plane. My neighbor—suffering from what looks like a nasty-looking compound fracture of his lower arm—and I get up and join the queue limping forward.

In these first few minutes, firefighters assess passengers quickly: Who can get off, who needs help, and who’s beyond it. “With fatalities, we’re leaving the body where it’s at,” says the airport’s fire captain, Mark Domingo. “They’re part of the investigation.”