It’s summer in California, and the Santa Maria Tanker Base is ready for the 2023 fire season. “We’ve got six personnel staffed with the base, and that’s parking tenders, ramp coordinator, tanker base manager, and timekeeper,” said Alex Ihle, air tactical group supervisor with the Los Padres. “Then between the primary mix plant here with Perimeter Solutions and the annex, there’s six or seven personnel ready to load tankers.” The air attack platform includes Ihle and his trainee, plus a contract pilot, and Tanker 101 has two pilots and a crew chief, he explained to News Channel 3-12.
The airtanker base, at the south end of the Santa Maria Airport a bit north of Lompoc, covers more than 3.6 million acres of response area, including San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, and Ventura counties, as well as the Los Padres National Forest. The base opened for the season nearly two months ago, but significant rainfall over the winter and into spring has meant a late start to operations. Ihle said they delivered their first retardant in early June.
“That’s just a result of more rainfall than normal,” he said. “We are in essence about two months behind where we normally would be. Our fuel moistures now are right about 96-to-97 percent, and we typically see that fuel moisture percentage in early May, so we’re a couple of months behind.” Since opening in mid-May, the base has responded to just eight wildland fires, including the Villanova Fire near Ojai last week. While the tanker crew from the base flew out, they did not drop any retardant on the fire, which was limited to just 20 acres.
Erickson’s MD-87 aircraft, which can land loaded, were recently granted permission to make gear-up drops; Bill Gabbert wrote about this back in 2017.
This year Tanker 101, a 3000-gallon MD-87 owned by Erickson Aero Tanker, has been stationed at the base since June 5, and Capt. Brent Conner has been flying wildland fires for a few years — about 30 years as a tanker pilot and about 30 years as a cropduster pilot. He said T-101 will remain stationed at Santa Maria as long as they’re needed there.
Bill Gabbert caught this photo of the MD-87 aircraft at Madras, Oregon June 13, 2016.
“I saw five of Erickson’s MD-87s at Madras,” he wrote in 2018. “They were parked in single file and my 24mm lens was not wide enough to get them all. The one missing in the photo also had Spanair on the side. Erickson bought at least seven of the MD-87s. They began flying two of them as airtankers in 2014.”
Erickson currently has seven MD-87 airtankers, five now on contract and two more headed out this week, in addition to its three DC-7 tankers.