Aug. 7—ELMO — Residents, firefighters, tourists and rubberneckers on the west shore of Flathead Lake this past week may have noticed something unusual in the air.
There is, of course, the massive plume of lung-choking smoke rising from the fast-growing Elmo 2 fire. But flying in formation through that smoke were up to six purpose-built firefighting planes rarely deployed in the U.S., and never deployed in such numbers to the same incident in Montana. The most conspicuous of the fleet are the four yellow-and-red "Super Scoopers" operated by Belgrade-based Bridger Aerospace. Clocking in at $30 million each, the four planes were joined by two nearly identical aircraft operated by Spokane's Aero-Flite.
Unlike most other aerial firefighting resources, from single-seat helicopters to massive turbofan-powered air tankers, the CL-415 plane operated by Bridger and Aero-Flite is a unique firefighting machine. Helicopters employed over fires are usually repurposed military helicopters or their civilian aviation counterparts. Air tankers are built from airframes of commercial jets, like the BAe-146 or the DC-10, a storied commercial airline mainstay. Scoopers are commonplace among firefighting aircraft used in Canada and Europe, but are rarely seen in the U.S. The Elmo 2 fire is an anomaly with six scoopers working one blaze.
"It's a purpose-built firefighting aircraft — the only one in North America," said Will Wood, a Super Scooper pilot for Bridger Aerospace. "This airplane's specifically designed to do this job, so everything about it is really optimized for being over fire and getting the most water delivered to the fire as quickly as possible."
The Super Scoopers operated by Bridger are technically CL-415EAF models. The EAF signifies "enhanced aerial firefighter," a designation bestowed by manufacturer Viking Aircraft for the planes Bridger ordered. They feature more powerful engines and are capable of longer flights than the CL-215 firefighting plane the model was developed from.
"The interior of the airplane's been stripped out to make it as light as possible," K Mita, Bridger's director of marketing and communications, said inside the fuselage of a Super Scooper parked in Kalispell on Thursday. "Really, the primary goal of this airplane is to carry these two tanks."
The tanks carry a combined total of 1,412 gallons of water. The plane can cruise at just over 200 mph and fly as slow as 78 mph, according to Wood, who described "a big range of operating parameters that we can use." The planes can fly for up to four hours before refueling, and pilots can fly up to eight hours daily according to U.S. Forest Service regulations, he said. During those flights, pilots try to make as many laps as possible between a water source and a fire.
Another unique factor, and the plane's namesake: A Super Scooper doesn't land or return to a base to refill its tanks. Instead, the plane skims a body of water at around 100 mph while forward-facing intakes on the underside of the fuselage fill the plane's internal tanks by force, without a pump. Once tanks are full, water overflows out of the sides of the plane and the pilots retract the intakes. The filling process take about 12 seconds, allowing for 2 — 3-minute laps around a fire.
On Thursday afternoon, Northern Rockies Team 7 Public Information Officer Dan McKeague said that the team had "efficiently and effectively" used scoopers to significantly slow the Elmo 2 fire front as it approached a road that ground crews were reinforcing as a fire line.
"The other day we did 104 drops on the fire in one day with one airplane," Wood said. "We're doing a whole circuit every two minutes to three minutes. Fourteen-hundred gallons every two minutes from one airplane, and then we've had four to six airplanes doing that. So we're putting up to eight to ten thousand gallons of water on the fire every three minutes, and it's very efficient compared to — it's a different tool in the toolbox — but we put a lot more product on than the retardant airplanes. They're putting on 3,000 gallons every 40 minutes to an hour. Every two to three minutes we're doing twice that, three times that."
But, Wood reiterated, scoopers fill a wholly different purpose than retardant planes: "We're trying to go direct on the fire. They're putting it out in front of the fire so it has something to bump into, slow the fire down."
In fact, a whole menu of different aerial resources, each with its own purpose, can be deployed to fight a wildfire, and many of them have already been used on Elmo 2.
Planes don't put out fires
Pilots in firefighting planes and firefighters on the ground agree: Aircraft don't put out fires — firefighters on the ground do that.
"Neither of us really put out fires," Wood said of scoopers and air tankers. "We slow the fire down so the ground resources can get in. They're the ones that put out fires, and so we try to support them and keep their operation going, whatever they want on the ground."
Before his two seasons flying scoopers, Wood worked Air Attack on wildfires for five years, and he's been flying a variety of planes for more than 40 years. Above the helicopters and planes large and small that work a wildfire, he said, Air Attack coordinates the airshow of various aircraft.
"They're kind of like observation platforms," he said, "and they do all the air-traffic control over the fire to keep everybody safe."
Generally, when pilots take off in a scooper, they'll communicate first with air-traffic control at the local airport tower, and then they'll check in with the Forest Service. As they approach a fire, pilots check in with Air Attack.
"He'll give us a task when we're coming in," Wood said. "He'll kind of pre-brief us when we're coming in so we can get a picture in our head of what we're going to do. Once we come on site he'll give us a target description and he'll get us lined up on the part of the fire that he wants us to work."
After that, scooper pilots figure out where to scoop from (Super Scoopers can draw from water as shallow as 6 feet, as short as a mile, and in waves up to 2-feet tall), and then they develop a circuit between their water source and their target.
"We make it safe first," Wood said. "And then effective getting water to the fire, and then we try to make it efficient, getting there as quickly as possible."
Like helicopters, scooper planes drop water from local sources directly onto flames in an effort to suppress fire. The goal is to dampen fire activity and slow growth so that ground-based firefighters can build lines or protect structures in the path of a blaze. A scooper plane drops its 1,412 gallons of water over about 100 yards.
Helicopters drop far less water but they can hover precisely and deliver a water drop to a specific point identified by firefighters on the ground, such as torching trees near a house. Type-I helicopters are heavy-lift helicopters capable of carrying a "Bambi bucket" of up to 700 gallons of water. A helicopter hovers over water and dunks the bucket to fill it, then ferries it to a target to douse. Some helicopters, like the twin-rotor CH-47 Chinook helicopters operated by Columbia Helicopters and Billings Flying Service, are outfitted with an internal tank and snorkel that sucks water into the tank from below the helicopter. Occasionally a Sikorsky S-64 Sky Crane, another heavy-lift helicopter, will work a wildfire. A Sky Crane was making water drops on the Elmo 2 fire Thursday alongside a Chinook. The specialized KMAX single-seat helicopter is also often employed on wildfires.
The lighter-duty Bell UH-1 "Huey," iconic for its heavy usage in Vietnam, is a Type-II helicopter. It can carry up to 300 gallons of water in a bucket and is often used by state and federal agencies in wildland firefighting. Type-III helicopters can carry up to 180 gallons of water and are often used for observation and personnel transport.
"Helos are great for pinpoint drops," Mita said. "Of course they have the ability to hover, and they really can get down to the nail-drop of a drop where the firefighters need."
Out ahead of fires, air tankers drop retardant with the hope of slowing or stopping a fire when it reaches a line of retardant. Retardant foam — essentially a mixture of water, dye and ammonium phosphate fertilizer — doesn't put out flames. Instead, it makes treated fuels less likely to ignite.
"If you think about a house fire," Mita said, "when you have fires coming at you, you want to build a moat around your house to protect from fire, to protect your house from catching on fire. What the retardant guys do is they'll come around and they'll drop the retardant around your house, and basically create a moat to protect your house. The issue is that, when your house is on fire, that's not their role. They're not designed to suppress or extinguish fire. That's where the water comes in."
Single-engine air tankers, often referred to as SEATs, can deliver up to 800 gallons of retardant in a drop. SEATs are generally propeller planes operated by a single pilot. They're "ideal for wildfires in lighter fuels like grasses and sagebrush," according to the National Interagency Fire Center.
Large air tankers, or LATs, generally feature two or four propeller or jet engines and carry up to 4,000 gallons of retardant. Some, like the BAe-146 aircraft operated by Missoula-based Neptune Aviation, are unusually powerful and maneuverable aircraft for their size, making them ideal for wildland firefighting applications.
But when quantity is the utmost consideration, a very large air tanker can be deployed. Referred to as VLATs, this class of firefighting aircraft is primarily the McDonnell Douglas DC-10. Carrying up to 10,000 gallons of retardant, there are only four DC-10 VLATs operating in the U.S., and at least one has worked the Elmo 2 fire so far.
A variety of entrepreneurs and companies have found limited success operating a converted Boeing 747 carrying up to 20,000 gallons of retardant. The plane, dubbed "Global Super Tanker," was mothballed last year. The plane is set to become a freighter, as it was before becoming a tanker, but another company purchased the tanker's retardant delivery system and hopes to build another 747 into the Global Super Tanker.
And above all of those aircraft, most of which were present at Elmo 2 the past week, Air Attack is orchestrating the show.
"There are a lot of great assets out there," Mita said, "everything from helicopters, single-engine air tankers, and then you've got the big boys — LATs and VLATs. And we kind of have a nice, cool sweet-spot right in the middle of those."
___
(c)2022 Missoulian, Mont.
Visit Missoulian, Mont. at http://www.missoulian.com
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
