Firefighting air tanker crashes in California

Three pilots died in the crash of a large air tanker used to control wildfires Wednesday night. The plane went down in a remote area of California's Lassen National Forest.

Rescue workers spent the night clearing a place for a helicopter to land and finally reached the crash site, which is inaccessible by roads, early Thursday morning. It is not clear yet what caused the crash.

The tanker, which was owned and operated by Aero Union of Chico, Calif., was one of just a handful of the large planes that had been cleared to fly in wildfire missions for the Forest Service and Interior Department this year.

The three pilots were participating in a training flight-the plane's seventh flight that day-in which they dropped fire retardant. They included Aero Union's chief pilot and two captains. "There was a lot of experience in that plane," said Alan Ross, Aero Union's director of Washington operations.

The crash ignited a fire covering about two acres. Because the fire had not spread overnight, managers at the forest headquarters said they do not expect it to grow.

Last spring, the agencies canceled contracts with eight companies that provided 33 large tankers following a report by the National Transportation Safety Board that found the planes lacked adequate safety and inspection records.

Most of the tankers are retired military planes retrofitted to carry water and fire retardant. The fleet has an average age approaching 50 years.

Aero Union was the only company to get its tankers back into service last year. The P3s it operates still are used by the Navy, which made obtaining maintenance information easier.

Aero Union already had negotiated 2005 contracts for seven of its eight P3 Orions. The contract for this particular plane, which was manufactured in 1966, was scheduled to begin in May. "We don't know what the implications of this will be," said Dave Dash, aviation group manager for the Bureau of Land Management.

The National Transportation Safety Board dispatched a team to investigate the crash. The plane was not carrying a "black box" flight recording device. During firefighting missions, tanker crews check in with a dispatcher at regular intervals. But because this was a training flight, the crew had not been in communication by radio.

In addition to Aero Union's seven P3 Orions, the Forest Service and Interior Department likely will have contracts with three other companies to provide one tanker each. These planes, which have not yet met the recommendations of the NTSB report, will be equipped with sensors to collect data on the stresses of wildfire missions and will fly only in sparsely populated areas.

"We're short on tankers compared to previous years," said Matt Mathes, a spokesperson for the Forest Service in California. "What we've done is to make up the difference with helicopters." The federal agencies will have contracts that give them exclusive use of more than 500 helicopters and will be able to call in about 200 more if necessary.

Mathes said most of the incident commanders in California prefer helicopters to the large tankers because they are easy to maneuver in rugged terrain and usually newer. The largest helitankers can carry almost as much water or retardant as the large tankers and can make return trips much faster.