Burns and Crashes

n unprecedented string of fatal crashes this summer raised serious questions about the way federal agencies use aircraft to fight forest fires. Agencies use planes to locate fires, ferry supplies to firefighters, carry smoke jumpers, and drop fire retardant and water on the blazes. Big, old former military transport planes used to spread retardant are most at risk. Owned exclusively by contractors, the heavy air tankers increasingly show signs of strain and poor maintenance. Two were involved in fatal accidents that killed five crewmembers during the 2002 fire season. But helicopters and smaller planes also are suffering the effects of poor maintenance, little attention to safety, and almost no pilot training. A blue-ribbon panel appointed to identify weaknesses in the current firefighting aviation program reported in December that:

• The safety record of planes and helicopters used in wildland fire management is unacceptable.
• The current system of contracting for, certifying and operating the aerial firefighting fleet is unsustainable. Federal contract provisions contain disincentives to flight safety.
• The Federal Aviation Administration has failed to ensure the airworthiness of firefighting air tankers.
• Training is underfunded and insufficient for the use of helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft in firefighting situations.
• The culture, structure and management of agencies involved in wildland firefighting are ill-suited to safe and effective operations.
• Because severe drought since 1996 has created the worst fire danger in some areas in 100 years, and because people increasingly are moving to rural areas adjacent to forests and wildland, firefighting has become more complicated, more urgent, and now warrants the attention of national leaders.

On June 17, the wings broke off a Lockheed C-130A Hercules air tanker as it pulled up after dropping fire retardant on the 10,000-acre Walker Fire in Central California, north of Yosemite National Park. The crash, which killed a three-person crew, was one of three fatal aviation accidents during the 2002 fire season.

Just three weeks after the C-130A went down, eight smaller air tankers-Lockheed P2Vs and SP2H Neptunes-were grounded after a crack was discovered in one plane's wing. The next week, on July 18, a World War II-era Consolidated Vultee PB4Y-2 Privateer, another type of air tanker, crashed at the Hayman Fire northwest of Denver. The plane belonged to Hawkins and Powers Aviation, of Greybull, Wyo., one of the largest and oldest aerial firefighting contractors in the country and the owners of the C-130A that crashed in June. Two crewmembers perished in the July 18 crash after the plane's left wing split off from the fuselage. After the two fatal crashes in two months, the 11 large tankers-one-quarter of the 41 planes in the privately owned firefighting fleet-were grounded for the remainder of the 2002 fire season due to concerns about their airworthiness.

The grounding of the heavy tankers left aerial firefighting to a fleet of smaller fixed-wing aircraft, single-engine air tankers and dozens of helicopters. These aircraft were not immune from accidents: On July 30, a helicopter crashed while dropping water on the Big Elk Fire in Colorado, killing the pilot.

In six weeks, three crashes killed six people. In the same period, there were three nonfatal accidents involving heavy tankers, single-engine tankers and helicopters. In all, eight fixed-wing aircraft and seven helicopters were involved in accidents during the 2002 fire season. In addition to the six fatalities, seven pilots and crewmembers were injured. This string of calamities underscored the risks of and intensified concern about the aerial firefighting system.

GROWING DANGER

Flying any aircraft at low levels over rugged, mountainous terrain is dangerous. Doing it while struggling with erratic, gusting, smoke-filled winds and strong, fire-fueled updrafts while trying to find a drop point for retardant is even more perilous. When the aircraft is old, lacks sophisticated instruments and is loaded with up to 3,000 gallons of retardant, the risks mount rapidly.

Aircraft are vital tools for battling forest and wildland fires. Helicopters ferry ground crews and equipment in and out of fire zones and drop water and retardant. Small fixed-wing aircraft serve as spotters and lead planes for the less agile heavy tankers. Other aircraft, including U-2s from NASA, provide high altitude photos and other imagery for planning and decision-making. Transport planes deliver personnel, vehicles and equipment.

With a single exception-the CL-215 and its younger cousin, the CL-415, twin-engine planes built by Bombardier Aerospace, headquartered in Montreal-no helicopters or fixed-wing aircraft are built specifically for firefighting. The Canadian planes scoop water into their belly tanks as they taxi on the surface of a lake, river or the ocean. The rest of the aircraft used in firefighting were built for other missions and modified to carry and drop retardant or other substances. Helicopters sling buckets from their bellies that they dip into lakes or other bodies of water. Other aircraft can fill their tanks with a vacuum-like snorkel.

The heterogeneous firefighting fleet includes heavy tankers, including former military transports, patrol planes, bombers, flying boats and modified civilian airliners. Logging helicopters, called heli-tankers, and agricultural aircraft, mostly crop-dusters, also are used; the latter are classified as single-engine air tankers. The heavy air tankers, single-engine tankers and some of the larger helicopters, such as the ungainly, mantis-like Sikorsky S-64 Flying Crane, drop retardant-a water and foam mixture-or water on fires. Smaller helicopters fill their buckets with plain water.

Each fire-quenching substance has its benefits and drawbacks. Water can evaporate in a fire's high temperatures or dissipate if dropped from too high. Water mixed with foam is more effective when dropped on burning or threatened structures, but it is intended only to slow the advance of fire, not put it out. Heavy air tankers, the C-130s, P-3s, DC-6/7s (and their military version, the C-54) and PB4Ys carry up to 3,000 gallons of retardant, also known as slurry, the bright red chemical stew frequently seen spewing from air tankers on television and in photographs.

The machines and tactics for fighting fires can turn deadly. Since the 1940s, the overall number of deaths related to wildland firefighting has quadrupled. The death rate on the ground has remained level, considering the growth of the firefighting force. The increase in casualties comes from vehicle accidents outside immediate fire zones, fire-induced health problems and from aircraft accidents. According to the blue-ribbon panel, the contract large tanker fleet has lost one plane a year to accidents, on average. Twenty-one people died fighting forest fires in 2002-six in aircraft crashes.

"We designed the system originally for the tankers to drop retardant in the initial attack phase to contain the fire quickly. With these horrific fires, we're using our tankers for longer periods of time," says Joe Walsh, a senior Forest Service spokesman in Washington. "We never envisioned the tankers flying for days on fires like the Hayman Fire." Beginning June 8, the Hayman Fire bedeviled firefighters for more than a month before they contained it on July 18. The Hayman Fire was the worst in Colorado history, burning more than 137,000 acres, 133 houses and more than 400 other structures, and costing $39.1 million.

The Hayman Fire and other huge blazes required firefighting planes to spend twice as much time in the air in 2002 as in an average fire season, according to the Aerial Firefighting Industry Association, based in Springfield, Va. The association's 13 members provide 90 percent of the federally contracted, multi-engine, heavy air tankers. Forest Service officials told the blue-ribbon panel that average flight time has risen steadily since the 1980s, from 100 hours per fire season to a range of 250 to 400 hours in the 1990s. Four hundred hours soon will become the norm. The Associated Press reported that air tankers had logged 7,658 flight hours through the end of July. Usually, the fleet averages 5,933 hours per year.

The agencies that fight forest and wildland fires-the Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management and the Bureau of Indian Affairs-use satellite imagery and sophisticated computers and software to detect, locate and predict the behavior of fires. But they rely on an old and shrinking fleet of large airplanes to battle the flames. The most troublesome aircraft are the lumbering, low-flying former military aircraft that have been transformed into air tankers to drop retardant. The growing number of large fires takes a special toll on the old heavy air tankers, which fly more missions to battle big blazes putting heavy pressure on the limited number of planes, pilots and maintenance technicians.

The two most visible and costly air tanker crashes in 2002 illustrate the special problems afflicting air tankers and the manner in which agencies and private contractors obtain these planes. The event that attracted the most attention from the public, news media, agencies and Congress was the June 17 loss of the C-130A. As the plane's wings folded away and separated from the fuselage, a television crew filmed the aircraft's final seconds, providing riveting images for the nightly news. The doomed Hercules was built for the Air Force and was first flown in 1956.

Then came the crash of the PB4Y Privateer during the Hayman Fire. One of five Privateers flown by Hawkins and Powers, this rare aircraft built in 1944 is a descendant of the famed World War II B-24 Liberator, a bomber the Navy used as a Cold War spy plane. Over Colorado, the plane's left wing separated during what one pilot described as "the smoothest, least turbulent conditions of the day." A Forest Service pilot of the lead plane for the Privateer's mission said, "the conditions were perfect for a tanker drop. No turbulence and no smoke in that area."

"The initial indication we have is that the left wing did come off prior to the aircraft impacting the ground," said David Bowling, a National Transportation Safety Board air safety specialist in Washington, shortly after the crash. The remaining Privateers were immediately grounded. In mid-

September, the NTSB found metal fatigue was implicated in both the C-130A and PB4Y crashes. The board still is investigating why the planes developed structural cracks and why the fissures grew-one, on the C-130A, to 12 inches in length-without being detected. Some combination of metal fatigue, corrosion, age and poor maintenance probably will be cited as contributing to both crashes. If so, the problem extends significantly beyond just a single contractor's operations.

RISKY BUSINESS

Aerial fire suppression is a business with few providers and even fewer customers. The 1920 Economy Act, as amended in 1934, limits the use of federal personnel and resources until all commercially available firefighting assets are engaged and unavailable. The law, intended as a boon for private enterprise during the Depression, forced federal agencies to rely almost entirely on private contractors for aerial firefighting.

This year, the Forest Service has contracts for 71 air tankers, including 45 heavy tankers. Nationwide, just nine companies fly heavy air tankers. Two companies provide almost all the retardant tankers use. The itinerant contractor air force flies from blaze to blaze during the four-month fire season. Each tanker repeats a cycle of loading retardant, taking off, dropping retardant and then returning to whatever airport is being used as a base. A single tanker can make as many as 12 to 15 drops a day.

The average age of heavy air tankers is 47. The newest planes in the heavy tanker fleet are retired Lockheed P-3A and P-3B Orions built for the Navy as patrol planes from the late 1950s to the early 1960s. The newest P-3B Orion, flown by contractor Aero Union in Chico, Calif., is 37 years old. Frugal private contractors get most of their aircraft from surplus military stocks under the Federal Excess Property Program. These aircraft were retired from active military service for a variety of reasons, including age, as measured by the wear and tear of flight hours on their airframes. The result is a scruffy jumble of planes gutted of all nonvital equipment-such as air conditioning-to make room for tanks to carry fire retardant.

Contractors contend that agencies don't pay enough to cover the cost of newer, better planes. "The operators cannot buy and operate newer aircraft under the current contract payment schedule," says William Broadwell, executive director of the Aerial Firefighting Industry Association. "The contract rates would not cover the costs of operations." In fact, according to Broadwell, at current rates, contractors can't even properly maintain or inspect their planes. "Contract rates will have to be higher to support the in-depth inspection and maintenance programs necessary for safe air tanker operations," he says.

The blue-ribbon panel lays much of the blame for firefighting aviation problems on poor contracting. "Federal agencies responsible for wildland aerial firefighting have adopted a widespread, short-term pursuit of cost efficiency, [resulting in] contracts that do not reward value, performance or safety," the panel found. "Government employees and contractors assume that Congress, the administration and federal agencies will never provide the money needed to do the job correctly and safely, leaving them to manage with whatever Forest Service and BLM budgets allow." Because of what the panel calls "a decades-long scarcity mentality," contractors "are encouraged to minimize maintenance, training and other costs to live within the contracting organizations' budget requirements," according to the panel's report.

A single C-130A costs agencies $5,508 a day in contract and standby fees. Standby fees guarantee the plane's availability even when it isn't flying missions. When flying, the costs for a single aircraft can grow by another $4,000 a day, including payment for the retardant and a fee for each load of retardant dropped. Retardant costs 73 cents a gallon. Each 3,000-gallon drop from a C-130A, for example, adds $2,190 to the total.

During the 2002 fire season, agencies spent more than $11.5 million a day for fire suppression. Federal agencies can't separate the exact costs of aerial firefighting from the overall bill for the entire fire season. But Tony Kern, the Forest Service's senior aviation officer, estimates that agencies spend between $300 million and $500 million each year on aerial firefighting operations, 10 percent to 15 percent of it on air tanker operations. The 2002 federal firefighting tab-$1.6 billion at the end of October with bills still being submitted-exceeds the record set in 2000 when agencies spent $1.36 billion fighting 122,000 fires on 8.4 million acres. At the end of the 2002 fire season, more than 71,000 fires had scorched some 7 million acres of forest and wildland.

LONG-STANDING CONCERNS

Last year's accidents and groundings have reduced the fleet of contracted heavy air tankers from 45 aircraft to 36. At one point in mid-July, only 21 heavy tankers were available; the remainder were grounded for maintenance, repairs or other reasons. The accidents also renewed long-standing concerns about entrusting aerial firefighting to contractor-owned, military castoffs. In 1996, the Interior Department's inspector general determined that five contractors with the Bureau of Land Management were not following strict maintenance schedules. The same report, based on inspections during the previous year, found the Forest Service equally lax in inspecting planes under contract.

In 1999, the Flight Safety Foundation, a nonprofit aviation organization based in Arlington, Va., reviewed aerial firefighting accidents involving fixed-wing aircraft between 1976 and 1998. "Agencies should accelerate their efforts to replace aging reciprocating-engine air tankers [such as the PB4Y-2, C-54 and DC-6/7] with turboprop air tankers [such as the C-130 and P-3]," the foundation recommended. "Until the aging airplanes are replaced, rigorous maintenance-and-inspection procedures, with special attention to power plants [engines] and landing gear, should be established and used."

The Forest Service and BLM have "placed an unjustifiable faith in the FAA's oversight of ex-military firefighting air tankers," the blue-ribbon panel found. "FAA regulations and the type of certificates awarded under them do not ensure that the FAA has determined that aircraft are airworthy or suitable for safe, long-term operation in a demanding aerial firefighting environment." As a result, the panel found, government employees in the field "are in the untenable position of having to determine whether an aircraft is safe to fly" when they "are often not qualified or equipped to make that assessment."

NO NEW PLANES

Meanwhile, the firefighting agencies have been stymied in their attempts to get newer aircraft from surplus military stocks. A 1996 law, the Wildfire Suppression Aircraft Transfer Act, which expires in 2006, directs the Defense Department to sell more modern, excess planes to firefighting firms. When the law took effect, a Forest Service task force recommended replacing the current fleet with 41 newer aircraft by 2016. No military fixed-wing aircraft have been identified as excess and available for sale or transfer since 1996, according to an Aug. 6 report by the Associated Press. The Forest Service is, however, acquiring 24 surplus Bell AH-1 HueyCobra helicopters from the Army's 10th Mountain Division at Fort Drum, N.Y., for possible use as lead aircraft. The Forest Service is hoping to get four or five functional aircraft and spare parts out of the surplus birds.

The Air Force-including the Air Force Reserve and Air National Guard-has some of the most modern Lockheed C-130s in its fleet, but rarely uses them for firefighting. Four units are equipped with six older model C-130H transports and two brand new C-130J Hercules transports that can be equipped with portable systems for dropping retardant. Since the Air Force and Forest Service established a joint program in the early 1970s, these units have flown more than 6,500 firefighting missions in the United States, Asia and Europe. But strict interpretations of the Economy Act prevent these units and others from being called into service unless no planes are available from contractors.

An Oregon Army National Guard pilot, who asked not to be named, flew a CH-47 Chinook helicopter in September over the 500,000-acre, $154 million Biscuit Fire in southwestern Oregon. The National Guard aircraft "were dismissed from the Southern Oregon fires as soon as enough private [companies] came on the job," he says. "That was in the middle of a supposed fire emergency, and that order sent six Type I machines capable of carrying 2,000 gallons a drop back to the barn."

The most recent effort to update the Economy Act was H.R. 5102, a bill introduced in July by Rep. Joel Hefley, R-Colo. In October, Thomas Thompson, deputy chief of the National Forest System said, "We believe that sufficient flexibility currently exists under the Economy Act to achieve the objectives of this legislation and, for this reason, cannot support the legislative changes proposed by these bills." No comparable Senate bill was introduced, and the measure died.

The air tanker industry objects to reducing limits on the use of federal firefighting aircraft. Bob Wofford, head of Associated Airtanker Pilots, based in Woodacre, Calif., believes the military has no place in firefighting, and says, "the Forest Service should acquire [military firefighting] aircraft and have them contracted out to private companies." A senior Aerial Firefighting Industry Association representative was equally blunt, saying of military fire suppression: "They ought to give us those planes."

SCARCE SOLUTIONS

Though land management agencies have wrestled with problems in the aerial firefighting system for years, they haven't come up with viable solutions. A series of Forest Service studies and reports appearing in 1996, 1998 and 1999 laid out a plan for modernizing the fixed-wing fleet, using newer surplus military aircraft for tankers and lead aircraft, but the reports also conceded that efforts to obtain those aircraft had been blocked by bureaucratic obstacles since 1998. That year, the military, the Forest Service, BLM and several contractors were found to have been engaged in illegal "plane swapping" as part of program to trade aircraft with historic value for more modern types. Some aircraft were illegally sold, some appeared to have been mysteriously acquired by U.S. intelligence agencies and ended up overseas. A few ended up in museums. Turning aerial firefighting responsibilities over to the military is unlikely and unrealistic, says the Forest Service's Kern, because the military is preoccupied with counterterrorism, and its transport resources and funding already are stretched thin.

The Forest Service is studying whether to use more heavy-lift helicopters, which Kern says are more popular among federal fire commanders than fixed-wing tankers. But heavy-lift helicopters are four to five times more expensive to operate and have limited range, speed and retardant capacity compared with heavy air tankers. What's more, an all-helicopter fleet likely would put the current aerial firefighting contractors out of business.

A longer-term option might be to model the national aerial firefighting fleet on the California Division of Forestry's air operations. The agency uses a standardized tanker fleet of 23 rebuilt and modernized Grumman S-2 patrol planes once used by the Navy, along with 11 SuperHuey helicopters and 13 former Navy and Marine Corps Rockwell OV-10 Broncos, a

Vietnam-era twin-engine turbo prop, used as lead planes. The fleet is operated by state employees and contractors and must respond within 20 minutes to any fire in the state. The Forestry Division also has a systematic program to upgrade, modernize and maintain its fleet.

The blue-ribbon panel recommended firefighting agencies shift "from a 'can do' culture based on chronic shortages to practices based on viewing fire emergencies as a 'business,' where sustainable performance replaces crisis management." Panel members also found that "appropriately funded contracts with longer time frames would foster stability in the aerial firefighting industry and allow contractors to finance replacement aircraft more easily." The panel strongly favored abandoning the 50-year-old strategy of retrofitting military castoffs. "Obtaining and outfitting newer military aircraft, such as C-130s and P-3s, would only perpetuate a cycle that has proven unsustainable and dangerous," the panel found. Instead, the panel suggested other options, including: creating a government-owned/contractor-operated fleet of air tankers, delegating more firefighting to the military, outsourcing aerial firefighting entirely to a contractor, or shifting aerial firefighting responsibility to a different agency to allow land management agencies to focus on their primary missions.