More than 21,000 personnel are battling 66 large wildfires in the early portion of an extremely busy fire season and the US Forest Service (FS) has activated all of the privately owned large air tankers (LATs) that they possibly can. There are no more available in the country.
The FS is the federal agency responsible for contracting for the large fire-slowing aircraft that can carry 3,000 to 4,000 gallons of retardant, or in the case of the DC-10’s, up to 9,400. The FS does not operate any government-owned air tankers; they are all privately owned, working under contracts administered by the FS.
As this is written on July 28, there are 18 LATs active on Exclusive Use (EU) contracts and 5 on Call When Needed (CWN) contracts, for a total of 23. In addition, the FS has borrowed the only LAT that Australia has, a 737, which flew across the Pacific a few days ago.
Five military C-130 Modular Airborne FireFighting Systems (MAFFS) have been called into action that can carry up to 3,000 gallons of fire retardant. Theoretically there should be eight available at all times during the fire season, but we were unable to find out from the FS if it would be possible to activate the additional three.
Some of us who follow the industry and aerial firefighting may or may not be surprised that the FS could only muster 23 LATs on EU or CWN contracts, because for years the agency has told the public and Congressional Committees that they have “up to 35 (or 34)” air tankers.
On May 17, 2021 Fire Aviation was told by a spokesperson for the FS that this year they would have 34 LATs if needed — 18 on Exclusive Use Contracts guaranteed to work, 8 “surge” LATs guaranteed to work for a shorter period of time, and another 8 on Call When Needed (CWN) contracts. Of those 16 surge and CWN aircraft, only 5 could be produced.
In a Senate Committee hearing on June 9, 2020 John Phipps, US Forest Service Deputy Chief for State and Private Forestry said, “We have up to 35 large air tankers (LATs)… and we are well under way for our planning and preparedness for the upcoming western fire season.”
On December 5, 2019 the FS said they had signed Call When Needed (CWN) agreements for air tanker services with six companies for a total of 35 aircraft. The number “35” was misleading because most if not all of the 13 large air tankers on exclusive use (EU) contracts at the time also had CWN contracts; some were being double-counted. That brought the CWN number down to around 22.
It turns out that leaning on that “up to” 34 or 35 number year after year has been a very weak crutch. “Up to 35” can mean any number between zero and 35. It should not be that difficult to count these huge aircraft, especially considering how much they cost to operate.
Some of the Western states have either realized that they can’t count on the federal government to supply them with air tankers when the need arises, or they have recently adopted a more aggressive approach to attacking new fires. Three states this year have leased a total of five LATs that are inspected and carded by the FS, capable of working on EU or CWN contracts for the FS if they had been offered the opportunity. California has augmented their fleet of 23 S-2T’s with two BAe-146’s and one MD-87, Colorado has hired one BAe-146, and Oregon is leasing an MD-87. In addition, the state of Washington has picked up on contract one LAT that had been working on an Alaska contract, a Q-400 operated by Conair. As far as I know the Canadian-converted Q-400 has not been blessed by the Interagency Air Tanker Board in the US, but the state organizations are not bound by that organization. There are also a handful of 1,600-gallon scoopers (CL-415 type) working for states, and too many 700-gallon single engine air tankers to count.
“Three [aircraft that have Forest Service CWN contracts] are operating in Canada,” said Stanton Florea, a Fire Communications Specialist for the FS. “Seven are not operational. They were either not built as airtankers, the companies cannot staff them, or the companies are not making them available to be on contract.”
There is a possibility, Mr. Florea said, that Canada could loan the US some air tankers or scoopers if they were available, through an agreement between the US National Interagency Fire Center and the Canadian Forest Fire Centre. However, the provinces of British Columbia, Manitoba, and Ontario have their hands full with their own fires — they are flying in firefighters from Australia to provide assistance.
CWN aircraft may or may not be immediately available during the fire season, with mechanics and crew members available to suddenly drop what they were doing and start flying fires. In 2017 the average daily rate for large federal CWN air tankers was 54 percent higher than aircraft on exclusive use contracts. But CWN costs are charged to the virtually unlimited fire suppression accounts, so the Forest Service does not care about using taxpayer’s dollars in that manner. And they are not held accountable.
While these numbers may have changed since 2018, it is unlikely that the differential between EU and CWN has changed much.
Over the last 10 years the average number of LATs on EU Forest Service contracts was 14.0 for the United States. The average number on EU contracts from 2000 through 2009 was 28.3. This year there are 18, which is 5 more than last year.
The FS goes as far as they can with the limited, insufficient funds appropriated by Congress and approved by the President. If the planes don’t exist when needed, new and emerging wildfires can more easily escape initial attack and grow into huge blazes, or megafires that can consume more than a million dollars of taxpayer funds each day. In the 14 days the Dixie Fire has been burning homes and hundreds of thousands of acres in Northern California, it has also been eating an average of $4.5 million in suppression funds every day. If some of that was instead spent on prescribed burning and additional EU air tankers, it might save money in the long run.
One of the lessons learned this year and others like it, is, Congress must appropriate adequate funds for the five land management agencies to pay firefighters a living wage, conduct more prescribed fires, and have at least 40 large air tankers and 50 large Type 1 helicopters on exclusive use 10-year contracts instead of 1-year contracts.
The peak of the Western US wildfire season is usually in August, but in 2020 the day with the highest number of fire personnel mobilized was September 19 when the record was set with 32,727 assigned to wildfires.
The outlook for August, September, and October predicts weather that will be hotter and drier than average for the Western US, which, if accurate, will lead to an above average fire season in the Western US. The live fuel moistures and Energy Release Components in many areas are already near or above the all time extremes.
Per Bob Davidson, The P-3 IS a great plane but why are they not all in use and why is there not a huge refurb effort on them? One may or may not be right about the maximum numbers but NOBODY can argue the points that California: 1.) has way too few fire bombers, 2.) could have afforded to have gotten more fire bombers, 3.) got screwed in the fire programs by greedy politicians, 4.) had the 2020 and 2021 fire seasons mismanaged!
All the airplanes that California needed to fight EVERY fire AT ONCE have been sitting in storage at Litchfield Park / Phoenix Goodyear Airport (GYR); Pinal Airpark (MZJ) in Marana, Arizona; Kingman Airport (IGM) in Arizona; Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson: The World’s Largest plane storage; Southern California Logistics Airport (SCLA); The United Airlines Standby yards and many, many others. California needs 500 fire bombers and there are over 10,000 planes just sitting in the desert and over 2,000 qualified pilots that are at home today. Forest Service people say “it’s too much paperwork” to get stored planes flying. Burned out cities say: “it’s too many lawsuits to NOT get these planes flying”. Look at the Cost-To-Date (CTD) of the Dixie Fire alone. 4% of that cost would have put an additional 500 water bombers in the air over ALL of California’s fires! Politicians should NEVER be allowed to run tactical fire fighting and disaster programs (IE: Afghan Exit).
In my mind, the best aviation wild fire fighting asset is and will always be the P-3 (your hearing the opinion of thirty years experience). Their strong, fast, nimble, proven and there’s a huge number sitting in storage.
My second thought is what the hell is going on with the P-3’s that have been operating over the last years?
X2
If the FS would get their heads out their asses, They would have never gotten rid of The Global Super Tanker 944 and it could be making drops on the #DixieFire
So could space x Chris, but it wouldnt make a tangible difference. But yes it would look good sitting on your couch and watching it happen live on the 6 pm news.
They didn’t get rid of it, Chris. It had a CWN contract with CalFire. Also with Colorado. In fact it had one with the USFS. They went out of business, dude.
Opinions are like belly buttons.
Just take some care folks.
Should be dropping less retardant, mush less. With the severity of the western drought the whole strategy should be shifted to more pointed protection of communities and infrastructure. These fires if not caught in the IA are unstoppable. What is happening now is nothing more than a waste of retardant, flight time, money, and pilot exposure. Articles like this only benefit the contractors looking to add to fleets.
All fires eventually are either put out or will burn out. Oh yeah, then there is that change of season thing or when enough rain falls.
Wasted retardant? And here I thought building line and supporting that line with retardant drops brings about containment. And that dropped retardant doesn’t help do its part to protect structures?
I understand the importance of pointed protection, but why should less retardant be used?
Airstrike and their P3s are missing too, they should be back on CWN contracts, proven system.
Where are Air Spray’s two BAE’s? did they not pass the grid tests? I guess the FS management needs to re-evaluate there answers of “oh we have enough aircraft and equipment to do the job, we don’t need any more”
There should be 40 to 50 airtankers period. they all don’t need to be on contract at the same time but, with fire season being a year round business these days you could easily use that many aircraft having most of them on contract during the peak times of the season. Another thing is the FS needs to step up and award 10 to 15 year contracts, then private industry would feel a bit better about investing in the equipment and talent to operate that equipment. Oh well something will change one day, or will it?
Horrible leadership, zero accountability, current organization structure too much for staffing levels, fire management shouldn’t be tied to aviation management, firefighters managing aviation programs (they do other things with aviation outside of fire, right?), diversity hiring. Based on the first 15 seconds of the new Chief’s swearing in speech, I don’t see anything changing. They can’t run a complex aviation organization with good intentions. They can’t run complex aviation programs with people that have no experience managing a program of any kind. They can’t run complex aviation programs with people whose sum total of aviation experience is watching things fly over them. The world of aviation passed this organization right on by about 25 years ago. One positive is you’ll never run out of things to blog or complain about.
Dude you’re just speaking generalities. It tells me you are either a retiree or a person so out of touch with the actual day to day operations that just wants to throw rocks. Explain to me how diversity hiring has ruined the complex aviation program? Let’s really dive into that…. Changing management decisions and changing technology has led to an organization that deems jet engines and low time airframes; over radials and high high time former freight aircraft. I know that’s a hard one for the old timers to grasp…
Let me know when they run out of Dozers, then I’ll get worried.
They had a fleet of 7 large air tankers and gave them up to California. More stupid bureaucratic decisions.
The FS did not have the funding nor the ability to convert those aircraft to tankers due to some thick red tape and a litany of purchasing laws . The C130’s were never tankers., they were USCG aircraft. CALFIRE still does not have one of those aircraft operational; but they are getting there – slowly. If you owned the technology to convert those aircraft to fire tankers and the FS wanted to get it on the cheap AND take business away from your own fleet of aircraft, you would have an issue with it too. Ultimately, giving them up to the State was the only way they were every going to get converted.
Is there a better choice of word instead of s l o w l y?
Too many players with too many excuses as to why those ex-Coast Guard H models are not dropping on fires NOW. The Air Force, Lockheed are not talking. Cal-Fire was talking but now not saying a word as the due date(s) came and went. It’s like Lucy holding the football for Charlie to make a kick only to yank it away at the last second!)
Coulson says nothing more than they have the RADS contract. One elected official, who lead the way to make the deal happen, isn’t providing anything more than excuses (like pulling teeth as to get those excuses) as to why it is taking so long. and no ETA.
The new wing boxes for the remaining 5 aircraft? Not so sure the Air Force has done a thing on them. No one can say, or are willing to say, where the wing box 5 are chocked at.
The FS never had a fleet of 7 Air Tankers(C-130’s from the Coast Guard) they had 3 C-130’s with 4 more coming. The tanking system was the military MAFFS systems currently being used by the DOD on the existing fleet of MAFFS. To this day California still hasn’t taken position of the 7 C-130’s. CF has 3 on loan for training that have been painted but no tanking system involved.
To be precise, for decades the seven C-130’s have belonged to the Coast Guard. They have never been transferred to the USFS or CAL FIRE. After most of the depot level maintenance had been completed on two of them, the FS borrowed them for a year or two and used them with the slip-in MAFFS.
Yeah those have drop so much retardant.