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The National Interagency Fire Center is a 55-acre federal complex located next to Boise Airport.
The response to wildfires on federal lands is orchestrated from an interagency facility at Boise Airport with access to hundreds of aircraft.
The National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) is a partnership of five agencies responsible for wildland fire management of 674 million acres of federally owned lands, with participation from the U.S. military and state forestry services. Other federal agency partners include the National Weather Service and U.S. Fire Administration.
- Hundreds of aircraft are engaged
- Growth is seen in acres burned
- Right-sizing the fleet is a challenge
Operational since 1969, the center leads the air and ground response to an evolving threat. While the number of large-fire incidents and acres burned can vary from year to year, the average number of acres burned per number of fires has increased in the past 20 years compared with the previous decade. Historically, large fires burned in a sequential seasonal pattern across the U.S.—now they can happen in multiple geographic areas simultaneously.
“We don’t dispatch the aircraft themselves, but we’re the ones that make sure the aircraft are available for dispatch,” says Michael Reid, aviation deputy division chief with the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). “We get them to the geographic areas where fire intensity is at its highest. Then we allow the dispatch and utilization of those aircraft to be managed at a lower level.”
An agency of the U.S. Department of the Interior, the BLM owns and manages the NIFC and is one of its two major users of firefighting aircraft along with the U.S. Forest Service, an agency of the Agriculture Department. They and other agencies draw from a government-owned and exclusive-use contracted fleet of 340 aircraft composed of 29 large air tankers, 35 smaller tankers, 10 single- and multi-engine water scoopers, 161 helicopters, 97 fixed-wing support aircraft and eight specially equipped Lockheed C-130s that can be activated by the military as needed. Aircraft that operate under exclusive-use contracts, which guarantee their availability for a defined period, constitute most of the fleet. The government owns 15 firefighting aircraft.
The federal fleet can be expanded by 700-1,000 additional aircraft through BLM On-Call or Forest Service “call-when-needed” contracts, which depend on the availability of the vendor’s aircraft, flight crews and mechanics.
“That is kind of our surge capacity,” Reid says. “We lean on that very heavily because we probably don’t have as many of the exclusive-use contracts as we would like. That being said, there are certain years when we’re not that busy, so trying to right-size that fleet is always a challenge for us.”
Aircraft Types
The BLM leads in contracting single-engine air tankers and amphibious water scoopers, primarily Air Tractor AT-802 turboprops and float-equipped 802Fs that are capable of dropping 800 gal. of fire retardant or water in a sweep.
The bureau uses Bell 205 and 212 medium helicopters that can carry up to nine firefighters and equipment to remote locations for the initial attack response to a wildfire. They can deliver up to 300 gal. of water to the fire line by bucket or tank. Smaller Airbus and Bell models also insert initial attack resources and often are used for aerial detection and mapping.
The BLM operates smoke-jumper bases in Boise and Fairbanks, Alaska, that are used to train and dispatch parachute-equipped firefighters from CASA C-212, De Havilland Canada Dash 8, DHC-6 Twin Otter and Dornier 228 transports. The Forest Service operates seven smoke-jumper bases.
The Forest Service leads in contracting large and very large air tankers, including the BAe 146, McDonnell Douglas MD-87 and McDonnell Douglas DC-10 as well as multi-engine water scoopers like the Canadair CL-415. It also uses heavy-lift helicopters—Erickson S-64 Air Cranes, Boeing CH-47D Chinooks and Boeing Vertol 234s—that drop water or retardant via a long line and bucket or by using a snorkel that replenishes an internal belly tank.
When contracted air tankers are fully committed or not readily available during periods of high wildfire activity, the NIFC can draw from a supply of eight Modular Airborne Fire Fighting Systems (MAFFS)—portable water or fire-retardant delivery systems that are carried on U.S. Air Force Reserve or Air National Guard C-130 H/J turboprops. A MAFFS-equipped C-130 can drop 3,000 gal. of retardant in 10 sec. along a 0.25-mi. line.
The Forest Service owns the roll-on/roll-off MAFFS units and supplies fire retardant, which is released through a nozzle on the aircraft’s rear left side. C-130s that fly the MAFFS mission are provided by California, Nevada and Wyoming Air National Guard wings and the Air Force Reserve’s 302nd Airlift Wing at Peterson SFB, Colorado.
At the request of the NIFC, U.S. Northern Command deployed C-130 MAFFS-equipped aircraft in July to conduct firefighting operations from Channel Islands ANGS in Port Hueneme, California. The move freed other large air tankers in Southern California to fight wildland fires in the Great Basin and Pacific Northwest regions, Reid says.
“We can activate those as needed for surge capacity,” he explains. “It happens typically that we will bring them on for a period of time. How long they come on and where they come on is always the unknown.”
The BLM started using small uncrewed aircraft systems (UAS) in 2016 for visual observation by ground crews. Since then, policy has shifted to using them more for aerial ignition of prescribed, or controlled, fires, as well as for aerial mapping and infrared heat detection. Both the BLM and Forest Service now use multiple types of UAS to battle wildland fires.
“We’re increasingly getting into aerial ignition—that’s one of the primary missions we utilize [UAS] for,” Reid says. “Historically, we’ve used helicopters, and we’ve had aerial ignition devices within those helicopters that can drop fire on the landscape. It’s an incredibly risky thing they’re doing, and we’ve made a shift over the past 2-3 years where it’s very prevalent that we’re using [UAS] to do that same mission.”
The fatal crash of a fixed-wing AT-802 Fire Boss on July 10 exemplified the various hazards of aerial firefighting. Juliana Turchetti, a veteran crop-spraying pilot and native of Brazil, was killed in the crash while fighting the Horse Gulch Fire in the Helena-Lewis and Clark National Forest in Montana.
Flying for contractor Dauntless Air in a four-ship formation, Turchetti was piloting a Fire Boss that was sent to Helena, Montana, from Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, to support the Forest Service in battling the fire. The float-equipped tanker crashed into Hauser Lake, a reservoir on the Missouri River northeast of Helena, while scooping water.
“The accident airplane was in the No. 2 position,” the NTSB states in a preliminary investigation report. “During its first scoop sequence, witnesses on the lake and the pilots of the two [single-engine air tankers] flying behind the accident airplane saw the airplane make a left turn to the southwest. Subsequently, the airplane impacted a vertical rock face bordering the southern shoreline of the lake, fell into the lake and sank.”
The BLM does not break out flight hours between fire and nonfire operations but says wildland fire aviation accounts for the majority of its flight time each year. It reported 4.95 accidents per 100,000 flight hours in the five-year 2019-23 period and zero attributed aviation accidents in 2022 and 2023.
The overall accident rate for general aviation in 2022, the most recent year for which statistics are available, was 5.34 accidents per 100,000 flight hours, according to the FAA.
Right-Sizing Resources
Planning for wildfires is challenging, as the number of large fires and acres burned each year varies. There were 56,580 large fires and 2.7 million acres burned in 2023—a slow year compared with 2022, when 68,988 fires burned 7.6 million acres, according to the NIFC. In 2020, 58,950 fires burned 10.1 million acres.
Aviation Week visited the NIFC in late October, when the nation’s available resources for fire suppression—ranked by Preparedness Levels (PL) 1-5—had been set at PL 3 by a National Multi-Agency Coordination Group (NMAC) that meets in a second-floor conference room and includes state firefighting agencies.
At PL 1, the lowest level of preparedness, geographic areas across the country can manage fire incidents using local resources with little or no national support. At PL 5, national resources are heavily committed, requiring that additional measures be taken to support geographic areas.
The NMAC had set the national preparedness level at PL 5 twice already, most recently on Oct. 17. The preparedness status in October was influenced by wildfire activity at the time and federal agency participation in relief efforts following Hurricanes Helene and Milton in the southeast.
Developing an aviation equipment strategy through 2030 was among the tasks of a 50-member Wildland Fire Mitigation and Management Commission created under the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. In January 2023, the commission produced an Aerial Equipment Strategy Report that recommended improvements to appropriations, contracting, staffing and military interoperability of aviation resources. However, the commission was ultimately unable to establish a total requirement for aviation assets this decade.
“The commission found that the current wildland fire aviation strategy is based on a seasonal model, yet fire seasons are now longer, overlap geographically in ways they previously did not, and indeed, may be full fire years,” the report states. “As wildfire seasons increase in duration and intensity, and as the need for proactive risk reduction treatments increases, there is a compelling need to reexamine existing approaches to aviation fleet procurement, use, composition and quantity.”
The BLM has partnered with other federal and state agencies on the initial work of an Interagency Fire Aviation Strategy to address items that were identified by the commission, Reid says. In addition, the BLM and other Interior Department agencies continue to pursue options to acquire and contract a more modern aviation fleet, he says.
Right-sizing the federal fleet is an ongoing process. “We’re working with our interagency partners on an aviation strategy that will help inform the number of aircraft, the ability to support those aircraft with facilities, the personnel and the budget,” Reid says. “It’s not the first such effort.”
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