Page 5 - Volume 11 Number 4

Firefighting
by MeLinda Schnyder
Fire season, typically early April to mid-October, is getting longer each year and some of the fires are more intense. In 2015, more than 10 million acres burned – the most recorded in a single fire season since the agencies started tracking data. The U.S. Forest Service cites climate change, the growth of communities into wildlands and the buildup of flammable vegetation for making managing fire riskier and more complex.
No one agency has enough resources to manage wildfires on their own, especially during peak season in July and August. The U.S. Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and National Weather Service saw the need to work together to reduce duplication of services, cut costs and coordinate national fire planning and operations. They formed the Boise Interagency Fire Center in 1965. The National Park Service and Bureau of Indian Affairs joined them in the mid-1970s, then the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 1979. The center’s name changed in 1993 to the National Interagency Fire Center to more accurately reflect its national mission.
Today the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC), still based in Boise, Idaho, is the command hub for the nation’s response to wildfires. More than 600 employees from eight federal and state agencies work together to mobilize aircraft, firefighters, engines, equipment and intelligence to respond to wildfire. While the majority of wildland fires occur in the western U.S., NIFC serves the entire country and in the past year has responded to major fires in Tennessee, Kansas and Oklahoma.
“Different parts of the west have the peak of their fire seasons at different times of the year,” said Don Bell, Flight Operations manager for BLM. “We just fly to wherever the fires are. We generally start out in the southwest and Texas in the April-May timeframe and then as the monsoons hit in early July, we’ll move up into the Great Basin: Colorado, Nevada and southern Idaho. A little later in the summer we usually move up into the Pacific Northwest and Montana. As it starts to wane in the northwest in the September-October timeframe, we end up heading down to southern California.”
Fixed-wing aircraft used in wildland firefighting fill the roles of lead planes, smokejumper aircraft, air tactical platforms and airtankers (see sidebar for descriptions of these roles). We talked to two National Interagency Fire Center agencies that operate King Air fleets about the platform’s use in aerial firefighting.
Bureau of Land Management
The Bureau of Land Management’s Office of Fire and Aviation is responsible for aircraft operation support for wildfire and resource management missions within the bureau. BLM’s aviation program is the largest within the Department of Interior’s eight bureaus. They own a 1990 King Air B200 as a firefighting aircraft and are in the process of purchasing a second
The King Air is the only platform the U.S. Forest Service uses for its lead plane missions, shown in this photo. The King Air releases white smoke to show the airtanker crew where they should begin dropping retardant to slow down a fire so firefighters on the ground can contain it. (PHOTO BY KARI GREER)
KING AIR MAGAZINE • 3
APRIL 2017