Wednesday morning at the Aerial Firefighting North America 2018 conference in Sacramento, Barry Lloyd, CAL FIRE’s Helicopter Program manager spoke about some of their operational objectives and the possible transition to Sikorsky Firehawk ships.
California’s legislature has approved funding for replacing the 12 Vietnam War era Hueys with new helicopters. The contract has not yet been signed, but all indications are that the purchase will actually occur.
In Mr. Lloyd’s presentation he described the helicopter program and some of the specifications that led to the selection of the winning vendor.
One of his main points was that CAL FIRE’s goal is to respond to every fire in the state for which they have suppression responsibility, within 20 minutes, and contain 95 percent of all fires before they grow to 10 acres.
(UPDATE: we initially had approval to include about half a dozen slides from Mr. Lloyd’s presentation, but on March 16 higher level personnel in CAL FIRE rescinded that approval and asked that we delete them.)
