First, let me thank you for reading FIRE FLIGHT and taking the time to come look up this expanded explanation. As you're already aware from my author's note, this is, and continues to be, a national crisis, and one to which Congress has paid grossly insignificant attention. The pages that follow are updated from my original posting and are current as of the winter of 2004-2005.

In a nutshell, while much has been accomplished since I wrote FIRE FLIGHT (33 of the aging airtankers grounded, new inspections required, some aircraft types permanently retired, and a far more realistic attitude adopted by the Forest Service), the problems are still with us and very serious. Most significant is the fact that we simply do not have enough reliable, modern, properly maintained and stressed airtankers to handle the growing threat of wildland fires throughout the United States. Second, we have yet to fully address the question of who should be doing the flying, and to what extent we ARE prepared as a people to support them and their families.

When FIRE FLIGHT first released in hardback in October of 2003, Southern California was erupting in a major, catastrophic series of wildfires that claimed both lives and billions of dollars in property from San Bernardino to San Diego. Up to that point, we had been relatively lucky that hot, dry summer, and we lucked out to an even greater extent during the summer of 2004. So, by the time the heavy rains of January, 2005, hit California, our collective memories had begun fading, not only regarding the ruinous potential of wildland fires and the inadequacy of our aerial firefighting capabilities, but also forgetting the underlying fact that the majority of our forests coast to coast have become more and more vulnerable to destruction by fire.

Let me give you some deep background:
There are several important aspects to the current wildland fire situation that, in my opinion and experience (and in light of my recent research for Fire Flight) need a much higher level of public awareness. The first is a generic consideration but a very important one: The overall drought in the Western U.S. is unquestionably related to - and results at least in part from - the continually emerging "signal" of global warming.1 (See FOOTNOTES below for a more extensive discussion of global warming and the greenhouse effect, and I would also urge you to read a recent, excellent National Geographic article on global warming in the September, 2004 issue, page 2). More properly stated, the overt, emerging and measurable effects of increased heat retention in the Earth's atmosphere caused by the increase in greenhouse gasses over the past 150 years of industrialization is materially raising the threat to our forests. As a journalist I've become knowledgeable on this subject having written a book about it in 1991 (WHAT GOES UP, Wm. Morrow, New York). Much of the urgency we need to feel in regard to wildland fire fighting and heightened fire potential comes not just from a cyclical drought, but from the promise of more extended and regularly experienced drought conditions coupled with increasingly warming weather patterns in summer, all of which massively increase the potential for major forest firestorms (such as Yellowstone in 1988). Add to that the huge load of unburned fuels on the floors of most western forests - too many of which are known as stage 4, or 250-300 year old growth areas where no fire has pruned them in those same centuries - and the increasing vulnerability to virtually any endemic climactic heat profile or drought profile becomes its own emergency. If this wasn't worrisome enough, we have large insect infestations in many western forests adding to the dried dead-load of fuels, and we have the steady encroachment of civilization, homes, cabins, and structures. All of this demands that we, as a nation, develop far more sophisticated and capable means of early fire suppression and firefighting capability at the very moment our aerial firefighting delivery systems have suffered a mortal blow.

Now, let me explain what I mean by that last sentence.

When a forest fire breaks out in difficult-to-reach or inaccessible areas - and provided the fire isn't a natural start (IE lightning) in an area which can be allowed to burn naturally - a speedy response can make the difference between an annoyance and a holocaust. While it is true that helicopters are far more effective than any form of airtanker in dumping canvas bags of water (or up to 18-thousand pounds of water from a Skycrane) precisely on a spot fire where there is a fast-moving fire front involved, airtankers are often the best hope for quick containment while the choppers get into position and/or the hotshot teams assemble their defensive measures on the ground. An entire squadron of airtankers full of fire retardant slurry can't be expected to put out a significant flame front running through trees in a volatile forest (crowning), but they can dramatically slow down the progress of the flame front in order to give time for ground crews to cut line (as they call it) in front of the fire, and to "backfire" from that line toward the advancing flames to deny the fire front the chance to jump the line and continue on. Sometimes the area is so inaccessible that only airtankers can be deployed, and a goal line stand perhaps a mile away in the path of the fire is the best containment method. (Smoke Jumpers are also highly effective for very early spot fires, but once a flame front gets moving, the smoke jumpers are ineffective).

Essentially, airtankers have two basic functions: 1. Precision-guided munition for early attack and suppression of new fires; and 2. Close-in air support for existing fires, such as opening a half-mile wide line to prevent a crowning fire from jumping an existing scratch line or road or other barrier.

Once a fire becomes really well established and large, airtankers become rapidly less effective, and when a crowning, running fire is growing toward a firestorm, airtankers become essentially useless. A situation occurred in 2002 in Arizona where high winds whipped up an otherwise containable fire and became strong enough to ground both helicopters and airtankers. So, early and rapid strategic and tactical use of airtankers through good, quick decision-making by incident commanders on the ground (or in Boise, their interagency fire headquarters for the west) in conjunction with a sufficiently numerous and effective fleet of fast, reliable, high-capacity airtankers is an essential and basic tool for dealing with potential deadly and destructive wildland fires. Having laid that predicate, the problem is, in essence, (1) the "fleet" we have is falling apart, and there is nothing on the horizon to replace it, and (2) a significant percentage of the companies that do the contracting for airtanker services and the pilots they employ are nowhere near professional enough in their adherence to rules and procedures and to the philosophy of safety first.

Among the cats-and-dogs private companies who have traditionally supplied the ancient pelican aircraft used for firebombing purposes, most have been too busy making money to pay attention to the fact that no one really knows just how much airborne abuse their old aircraft can take before they literally fall apart in the air. Let me go over a quick background here. Following World War Two, the concept of early delivery of water or what was an early fire retardant slurry (borate) by air began with the conversion of surplus B-26's, the Navy version of the B-24's (PB4Y-2), and other retired Air Force craft, which were later joined by retiring piston airliners (DC-4, DC-6, DC-7, etc.). Belly tanks were engineered by private companies into the bellies of the aircraft, first with a single release gate, then later with more sophisticated dumping gates and systems, and all other equipment was removed from the cabin or bomb bays. One aircraft - the huge Martin Mars amphibian - became the champion capacity carrier with its ability to haul 7,200 gallons of retardant per load (this one has since been grounded). Ex-Navy P2V Neptune twin engine sub hunters were later converted, as were the earliest versions of the C-130, the 130A's, which had a notoriously weak wing box structure. Only the conversion of several ex-Navy P-3 Orions - the military version of the Lockheed Electra - amounted to a significant modernization of the available "fleet," and even then, the oldest, most fatigued Orions were used. In the sixties, a new type of retardant fluid was formulated to replace the red mud (borate), and this is still in use today. It's primarily an ammonia-based fertilizer colored red for easy identification of where it's been dropped. As the effectiveness of this sort of air attack became established, the professionalism of the airtanker pilots began to upgrade from a wild collection of marginally qualified crop dusters, with little or no experience in big airplanes, to more experienced and professional pilots (and younger ones with some military experience) to whom the concept of checklists and procedures was not such a foreign idea. With the FAA completely ignoring the whole industry and literally afraid to get involved - and with myriad federal and state agencies often working against each other in fire fighting efforts - only the Forest Service and the BLM (from Agriculture and Interior Dept.s respectively) began to write and enforce standards and procedures and safety and training. By the end of the 90's, the force was vastly better coordinated and the pilots far better trained and professional and safe, but the one gigantic gap in attaining both the level of dispatch reliability and the level of safety needed remained: Seven powerful, private companies, who would lose their vast profitability if ever forced to obtain and fly modern, expensive aircraft, continued to use worn out airplanes without a baseline of engineering knowledge regarding their use as airtankers.

Back to the "worn-out aircraft" part.

In the summer of 2002, we saw the very dramatic loss of two such tankers, a C-130A turboprop in California (the one where the wings folded up vertically when the wing box disintegrated from undiscovered metal fatigue), and the other near Estes Park, Colorado, when an old Navy version of the WWII B-24 (called a PB4Y-2) lost its left wing on the way to a fire. Both airplanes were owned by Hawkins and Powers, one of 7 airtanker companies located in Greybull, Wyoming. The terrible truth behind those failures is that not only did the subsequent permanent grounding of all PB4Y-2's and C-130A's lop off 25% of the nation's airtanker force, but the remaining 33 airtankers were (and are) equally subject to catastrophic wing or structural failure without warning, because there is no established program for tracking, inspecting, and measuring the stresses and the failure potential in this fleet!

The reason for this incapability is as simple as it is startling: none of these old aircraft - including the ex-Navy P-3's now cited as the best replacement - were ever intended by their designers and manufacturers to be used in the brutal, low-level, turbulent, and heavily-loaded environment in which they have been inserted. In other words, the engineering work which would have been necessary to know what to expect of an aircraft's structure in such an abusive environment has never existed, and no one (least of all the FAA which essentially hides from these issues) knows how to go about constructing a responsible, predictive profile, even if we were talking about new airplanes. For one thing, the only formal monitoring tests of the stresses on an airtanker's structure (using digital flight recorders) were done several years back by a team that I understand was so shocked by the results (excessive G forces and massive flexing of the structure), they simply disconnected the recorders, ended the experiment, and went away. Most of these old airplanes, including the DC-4 or DC-6, for instance, were carefully designed to haul passengers and a certain fuel load. Instead, when they are converted to firefighting use, they're lightly loaded with fuel and crammed full of thousands of pounds of retardant in an belly-tank never envisioned by the designers, then flown at fifty feet over ridge lines through the hellish updrafts and downdrafts of a firestorm and the mechanical turbulence of heavy winds blowing around hills and mountains, all of which causes the wings to flex mightily against the heavily loaded fuselage attach points, day in and day out. Couple that with the effect of the stress of years and years of abuse and the utter absence of engineering predictability, and it is no surprise that wings have come off. The real surprise is that it hasn't happened more. True, in the fall of 2002, Sandia labs jumped in and tried to come up with a sensible method of NDI (non-destructive inspections) of wing boxes and attach points and tried to design predictive instrumentalities as well, but everyone in that business now knows that the Sandia effort was a Band-Aid deployed for the purpose of returning the tankers to the air for a few more seasons. The reality is, the fleet is shot, and the time has come to prepare and field a nationwide fleet of aircraft specifically engineered, stressed, prepared, and monitored for this brutal task. Rather obviously, old aircraft with questionable maintenance histories can never meet the necessary criteria.

In addition to the problem of a deteriorating fleet of airplanes, the other major problem hindering efective forest firefighting lies in political pressure coming from the 7 companies providing firefighting airplanes (such as Hawkins and Powers) to maintain the status quo. In a nutshell, their practice has been to obtain ancient retired airplanes for almost nothing and use them forever, for nothing more than the price of maintenance. Such companies are always pleading poverty, but the reality is that their profits can approach 40% of gross revenues in a good season, and no such margin would be even remotely possible if they had to buy or pay for modern aircraft. True, they have pioneered this business, but in the case of at least some of these companies, their tools are ready for retirement, their safety record is too often abysmal, their maintenance, even at best, is highly suspect, and their ability to field a reliable fleet in the future without the government essentially buying the aircraft for them is minimal. But their massive congressional influence, stemming from their expertise and a misguided use of the concept of "grandfathering," has retarded any real understanding on the Hill of what has to happen: Significant change inclusive of federal (read: military) intervention.

The Options:

First, in place of the now partially-grounded ragtag fleet, a collection of far more modern and appropriately engineered, tested, and monitored airtankers is needed.

True, there are two models of a Canadian-built aircraft known as the Bombardier (Canadair) CL-215 and 415 Superscooper waterbombers, designed to skim the surface of a lake, scoop up water, and dump it on a fire, returning again and again (as with the PBY Catalina in the 80's Spielberg film "Always") to the fire. These are tough airplanes specifically designed and engineered for their job, with a clear baseline of inspection, maintenance, and a known fatigue life - all of which is 180 degrees different from our existing U.S. cats-and-dogs fleet. The CL-215s and CL-415s are widely despised by U.S. wildland firefighters - and predictably by U.S. airtanker pilots - primarily because they use water, which is far less effective than retardant for the job at hand, and because they are what is known as Type III tankers capable of carrying only 1,400 gallons (CL-215) and 1,600 gallons (CL-415) respectively. Compare that to the a DC-7 or P-3 or C-130 at 3,000 gallons (or a Russian-built Il-76 - not in current use - able to haul 11,000 gallons, or the Lockheed C-141B, which has never been converted, but is increasingly available through the Air Force bone yard at David-Monthan AFB, AZ, and able to carry perhaps as much as 10,000 gallons).

In brief, the fact that there are no new airtankers in use, when contrasted against the present exhausted fleet, rises to the level of a congressional emergency. The good news is that a number of companies are actively working to convert younger fleets of available aircraft, including former turbine-powered commuter aircraft and perhaps several Boeing 747's or DC-10's, which would be able to deliver 20,000 gallons apiece in a single deluge. If private industry can provide such aircraft - with a completely dependable amount of engineering knowledge regarding the life stress to be encountered and a way of thoroughly and effectively monitoring those stresses in real time using onboard flight recorders and sensors - then half the problem is solved. The other half - getting private companies to pay the funds necessary to buy such new and pricey creations - is another matter.

Given the hope that a new fleet of re-engineered existing aircraft, with robust and reconstituted life expectancy for the brutal job of airtankering, can be fielded within a couple of years without the federal government doing the direct research and development and perhaps purchasing, the second problem becomes the paramount consideration: who is going to operate the future fleet?

Here are those options:

A. The existing companies. At least some of the existing companies would view the cost of procuring and operating new and healthy airtanker fleets as cutting too far into their margins to justify continuing in the business, and would fold, dumping their existing crews on the "street." Others would make the purchases, hoping to elicit greater contract payments from the government in order to maintain their profits. When you understand that, traditionally, the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management have tried to keep everything on the cheap through competitive bidding the old fashioned way, it becomes obvious that only a uniform, mandated change to a new fleet of airtankers could keep the playing field level. Otherwise, the companies still operating broken down, bottom-feeding, cheap airplanes would always be able to win the contracts with far lower bids that still make them money. (This is bypassing, for the moment, the reality that the do-it-on-the-cheap governmental philosophy has also been one of the prime causative factors in poor maintenance and training and compliance issues with these companies).

The problem of professionalism and standardization still remains, and in that, the aviation section of the Forest Service, in particular, needs the means to bring all pilots and crews under the same standards of performance - something that can be done with a single, unified contract for the aircrews. The resistance of some of the companies can be expected to be fierce, since they maintain iron-fisted control over their pilots and personnel for the purpose of squeezing out every ounce of productivity. But it is that very propensity which leads to compromise of safety in human factors terms, and such myopic "shut-up-and-drink-your-Kool-Aid!" mentality must be changed. Therefore, using a unified contract for the crews and contracting with the companies only for their aircraft - and even then, contracting only for the newer fleet - solves a lot of problems.

B. Another option would be to create a special federal force (perhaps as a subset of the Forest Service and perhaps as a quasi-military operation) to engineer, buy, field and operate a national fleet. Politically, this is not a terribly viable option in the current administration, and it's a bit like reinventing the wheel when the availability of the Air Force Reserve and the Air National Guard is considered.

C. Use Air Force Reserve and/or dedicated Air National Guard units, new or transferred, as the aerial firefighters for the nation. The advantages would be reliable maintenance of a federal fleet properly procured and engineered, precise and replicable levels of expertise utilized with a high degree of safety and standardization, and the elimination of the myriad problems created by using a cadre of private contractors. Air Force Reserve units that operate newer, reliable C-130's already have the ability to help when all private assets are exhausted by loading a thing called a MAFFS tank aboard which allows 3,000 gallons of retardant to be dropped from a rear-hanging nozzle. Currently, there are only eight of them in the entire nation, and we need at least four times that many. There is some debate about the effectiveness of these missions due to lack of experience of the Air Force or Guard crews and inherent limitations of the MAFFS system. There is, however, no question that a dedicated series of squadrons who train specifically for this all year round could be highly effective in operating either an off-the-shelf MAFFS equipped C-130, or a well-engineered version of the newer C-130's with internally-installed tank systems (or some other, newer airplane). It is also quite possible that many of the existing air tanker pilots could be integrated into Reserve or Guard units, thus preserving their considerable expertise.
In fact, politically as well as practically, a good solution would probably be a 50/50 mix of private and military, with the private companies utilizing only a mandated, "new" fleet, as discussed, with the pilots operating under one federal contract which, in turn, provides standardization and proficiency training and checking and compliance monitoring, and using as the other half a cadre of dedicated, highly-trained Air Force and/or National Guard units around the West equipped with MAFFS tanks or even a new airtanker built specifically for the military.

There are, of course, other possibilities, but given the importance to the country in a time of increasing wildland fire risk (with no end in sight for the foreseeable future or distant future), it would seem that this is precisely the sort of challenge that government is best at solving, especially considering the failures and impending collapse of the present ragtag "system."

This is the challenge Congress is facing, and they don't know it! Even the congressional delegations from the Western states most affected by these challenges are apparently unaware that the present system has all but collapsed and, at least in regard to the need for reliable airtankers, is in meltdown. Patchwork fixes will no longer work.

That's the shorthand version, that I used as the background for Fire Flight. One of the most positive developments in tackling this problem has been the Blue Ribbon Commission created at the request of Tony Kern to examine the two wing-loss accidents of 2002. The Commission, headed by former National Transportation Safety Board Chairman Jim Hall, issued its hard-hitting and revelatory report in the fall of 2003, and the direct Web address to obtain a copy of that report is as follows:

.PDF File of Blue Ribbon Report obtainable at:
http://www.hallassoc.net/BRP_120502.pdf

...or in HTML form:
http://216.239.39.100/search?q=cache:HGxbwgcEm5kJ:www.hallassoc.net/BRP_120502.pdf+%22Jim+Hall%22+Blue+Ribbon+Commission+Airtankers+Forest&hl=en&ie=UTF_8
In 2004 some substantial changes were made. Thanks to the fearless leadership of former Air Force Lt.Col. Tony Kern (who had headed up the Forest Service Aviation division for several years prior), 33 of the most dangerous airtankers were grounded. A political firestorm instantly replaced the forest-based firestorms of fall and Kern found himself under massive attack from the airtanker companies, senators, congressmen, and others who simply did not understand the seriousness of the situation. Regarding Kern's courage inconsistent with the usual bureaucratic niggling, see: http://www.montanaforum.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=161

The compromise which resulted was a reasonable one, allowing some of the P-3 Orion tankers back in limited service if and only if they passed rigorous tests. One of the problems that set off the grounding, by the way, was the FAA's nonsensical insistence that the Forest Service had the responsibility to ensure the airtankers were airworthy. In other words, after decades of hiding from any responsibility to do the job themselves (as only the FAA is equipped to do), the FAA wanted to walk away and leave the very technical and difficult task to a branch of government utterly unequipped to test and inspect and determine overall airworthiness of aircraft - the Forest Service. Kern's response was the only reasonable one: If it's up to the Forest Service, then the entire fleet must be grounded, because there is no way the Forest Service can competently gear up to provide such assurance through inspections, and further, Congress had given the Forest Service no new funds to hire and assemble the force that would be needed.

When the dust more or less settled, a few of the tankers - newly inspected by outside parties - returned to service, while the older, more dangerous birds were permanently grounded. BUT, the problem has not been solved! There is no autonomy for the Forest Service as yet, no new fleet selected and financed federally, no federal takeover in whole or part, and essentially nothing even remotely resembling a national solution to a major national problem.
So what must be done?

First and foremost, Congress must have its collective feet held to the fire (pun thoroughly intended), because whether this summer or the next, the fire seasons will become progressively worse, and our inability to mount an aerial fight against the firestorms that are coming will create future headlines and finger-pointing that could be avoided now. Yes, this seems a small matter in the middle of a global war against terrorists who would prefer to kill us all (as well as ignite some of those tinder-box forests of ours). But if we don't face these issues head on and make national decisions that are not the result of pandering to special economic interests (IE whichever established airtanker companies refuse to modernize), we will pay a price in the billions, after an increasingly horrifying annual loss of life.

_____________________________________________________________________________
FOOTNOTES

1. Now, please, if you've been influenced by those who would urge that this is somehow a political problem, re-open your mind for a second. While I thoroughly enjoy Rush Limbaugh's entertaining commentaries and even agree with him some of the time, he - and others like him who have worked hard to polarize this issue - have done the world a great disservice by suggesting that global warming is a construct of environmentalists. You may not know that I wrote a major non-fiction book on this subject, WHAT GOES UP (Morrow, 1990), and that the theme of that book was precisely in the realm of political neutrality (the theme was that we had to stop polarizing science issues, and that global warming was a cautionary example). In researching that book, I had the amazing fortune to interview, and in some cases get to know personally, almost all the key scientists on the planet who were dealing with these major atmospheric issues. These are incredibly dedicated and intelligent men and women from across the globe who, believe it or not, have essentially no disagreement about one of the basics that Rush and others would like to have you believe is hotly contested: There is no scientific disagreement that the process of industrialization across our planet for the last century and a half has massively increased the percentage of CO2 - Carbon Dioxide - in our planet's atmosphere. There is also no disagreement that the effect of that added CO2 is what's known as the "Greenhouse Effect," which simply means that the more CO2 we introduce, the more of the sun's heat is retained after it enters the atmosphere and warms the air and surface below. Greenhouse gasses - of which there are many - let in solar heat, but retard the ability of that heat to radiate back into space.

So where IS the controversy?
What scientific controversy there is over global warming is confined to the question of how much the added global "load" of solar heat may affect the future weather, the average temperatures, and thus the patterns of life. It is very true that some people for their own political purposes use global warming as a bludgeon against industry and society, and by doing so have helped polarize the issue. It is also true that no serious scientist believes that we should go back to the stone age just to decrease the possibility of climate change from global warming. But the problem is real, with unknown consequences, and instead of making a political yell-fest of it, all of us have a responsibility to seriously consider what, if anything, can be done.

And I can tell you of at least one personally tested, empirical confirmation: As an Air Force and airline pilot for more than three decades flying in and through Alaska, I (and all airmen so privileged) have watched the glaciers melting at a furious rate during that entire period. We can literally see the progress of global heat retention.
One final point here: We have ice core samples now from Antarctica and Greenland, in particular, going back many tens of thousands of years, samples that utterly disprove the fanciful theory that the current massive increase in planetary atmospheric CO2 is merely some periodic "phase" earth goes through. And, no, volcanoes alone cannot account for any such past loading.

And here's the ultimate strategic worry. There is a point - no one knows where - at which the percentage of greenhouse gasses in an atmosphere like ours begins to cause a runaway heat cycle, each incremental increase in gas percentage causing an exponential increase in temperature. Ever wonder why the surface of Venus is hot enough to melt lead? In the fifties we were taught it had to do with Venus's distance from the sun, and the fact it was quite a bit closer than the earth's 93 million miles. We now know that the real reason is much more frightening: The Venuvian atmosphere is a runaway greenhouse. Hopefully that's not a precursor of earth's future, but doesn't it make sense to at least research the question without the baggage of political spin? I certainly think so, and I believe that stern admonition goes for Democrats and Republicans, conservatives and liberals, and "jaded" industrialists as well as "rabid" environmentalists.

Remember the picture of Earth from behind the moon entitled "Earthrise?" We're all on the same little blue marble. If we screw it up, we have no lifeboats.
See http://www.neptuneaviation.com/MSOchamber_ribbon.html.
And http://feinstein.senate.gov/04Releases/r_ground_airtankers.htm.
And http://www.nifc.gov/nr_airtanker_contracts.html.
And especially
http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:jon7yaeGRuAJ:www.nifc.gov/fireinfo/q_a_cancellation.pdf+air+tanker+grounding+forest&hl=en
Also see http://www.nevadaappeal.com/article/20040715/NEWS/107150015