FAA to help set up air tanker inspection program

Officials from the Federal Aviation Administration agreed Tuesday to assist the Forest Service and the Interior Department in developing an emergency program to inspect 33 large air tankers used in fighting wildfires.

"It will mean an expedited inspection for many of them," says Dallas Boyd, press secretary for Rep. Greg Walden, R-Ore. Walden is chairman of the House Resources subcommittee on forests and forest health.

The Forest Service and Interior announced last week that they would terminate contracts for all of the large tankers, which are owned and operated by eight private companies. The decision came on the heels of a report by the National Transportation Safety Board which said that though the planes are privately owned, Forest and Interior are responsible for ensuring their safety.

Because the agencies do not have the necessary inspection and maintenance capabilities, they decided to cancel the contracts. "We're a land management agency, not an aviation agency," says Tony Kern, who oversees the Forest Service's fleet of aircraft. "The decision was almost preordained by the NTSB report."

Though the agreement with FAA has sparked some optimism about the possibility of using the tankers this summer, the planes' fate remains uncertain. FAA does not have jurisdiction over public-use aircraft. Under the plan, FAA will not participate in the actual inspection. It will only provide expertise and guidance on how to set up the program. There is no timeline, and it has not been established who would conduct the inspections. "The Forest Service is still legally accountable for the airworthiness of the airplanes they contract for," says Les Dorr, an FAA spokesperson.

The NTSB report investigated three air tanker crashes, one in 1994 and two in 2002, in which one or both wings separated from the aircraft due to fatigue cracks. The average age of the fleet of mostly retired military planes is 48 years. In many cases, incomplete maintenance and inspection records make it difficult or impossible to document airworthiness.

Wildfires already are blazing in some Western states, and lawmakers have expressed concerns about the impact that terminating the tanker contracts will have on firefighting. "We've got a more volatile fire situation than we've probably had in the last 50 to 100 years," says Jeanine L'Ecuyer, press secretary for Gov. Janet Napolitano, R-Ariz.

In the past three years, the large planes have delivered about 20 percent of the water, fire retardant and foam used to combat forest fires. The tankers are used primarily for initial attacks because they can travel long distances faster and carry more than the other 400 or so aircraft in the firefighting fleet. The agencies said they will compensate for the loss of the 33 tankers with up to eight military C-130s and smaller aircraft such as single-engine air tankers, helicopters and helitankers, which have been used mostly for shorter-range missions.