Tanker fleet to be upgraded to fight nation’s wildfires
CHEYENNE, Wyo. – President Barack Obama signed a bill this week hastening the addition of seven large tanker planes to the nation’s run-down aerial firefighting fleet, at a cost of $24 million. The same day, two C-130 military transport planes designed for that very purpose sat on a tarmac in Cheyenne, shrouded in an eye-watering haze from a raging Colorado wildfire just a 15-minute flight away.
In all, eight workhorse C-130s stand ready to fight destructive wildfires around the country – but all are grounded due to rules governing the use of the nation’s aerial firefighting resources.
Obama signed the bill Wednesday at the urging of Colorado’s congressional delegation, which was quick to praise the move.
Three planes are supposed to be ready by mid-August: Two BAe-146s from Missoula-based Neptune Aviation Services, Inc., and one BAe-146 from Minden, Nev.-based Minden Air Corp. The BAe-146s are jet-powered.
The three will bring the Forest Service fleet to 20 large tanker planes – a figure that includes the lease of eight planes on Monday from the state of California, the Canadian Interagency Fire Centre, and a private DC-10 based in California. Another 11 tankers, including the C-130s, can be called into service.
“This is a major milestone in our efforts to modernize the large air tanker fleet,” Forest Service chief Tom Tidwell said in a release about the President’s bill signing.
Last year, Wyoming’s C-130s flew wildfire missions in Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oregon and Mexico.
But the Wyoming MAFFS (Modular Airborne FireFighting System) can’t fly from Cheyenne, where the Wyoming Air National Guard is based. The airport is not among those designated as an official staging area for attacking wildfires – and it lacks built-in infrastructure for reloading planes with retardant.
The MAFFS units are installed on the planes when they’re called into duty and can be removed to free up the planes for other uses.
The Forest Service, meanwhile, says it has all the air power it needs to work on northern Colorado’s 78-square-mile High Park Fire.
With drought and what has become a yearlong wildfire season, some experts insist as many as 50 planes, large and small, are needed nationwide, said Bill Gabbert, a wildfire blogger, veteran firefighter and owner of the Wildfiretoday.com website.
“You need to have air tankers responding within 25 or 30 minutes to new fires so they can slow them down quickly so that firefighters on the ground can put them out,” Gabbert said. “But we no longer have that capability. So initial attack by aerial resources is a quaint memory.”
The fleet numbered 44 planes a decade ago. A series of high-profile crashes, including wings that fell off a privately-owned C-130 and a 1940s-era PB4Y-2 Privateer in midflight, caused the Forest Service to ground 33 air tankers in 2004.
A Lockheed P2V crashed in Utah last week, killing two pilots.