WOW!
Significant drop in the USFS national airtanker fleet.
What are these people thinking?
The USFS made a request for operators to invest millions to obtain newer turbine powered aircraft, spend millions more to install new constant flow retardant tanks and then parks half the fleet.
How does the USFS expect to obtain and retain operators? How does the USFS expect quality maintenance, training, etc. when large operators are saddled with loans and debt for a new fleet and then they park half the fleet? Same for helicopter operators too. How do you retain trained mechanics and pilots?????? There is a pilot shortage with the airlines.
This is the start of an accident chain.
Dave Wardall, Chairman, Board of Director, AAF
As usual you have hit the nail squarely on the head. Even though U.S. Forest Service Firefighters are among the finest in the world the Agency itself, under the Department of Agriculture, is overburdened and underfunded. It is a huge bureaucracy with Firefighting as only one of its many responsibilities. The history of aerial firefighting within the U.S.F.S. has been a rocky road with shifting goals that have veered all over the map.
Industry companies have responded to the stated needs of the agency by investing huge amounts of capital and building the necessary infrastructure. That infrastructure is responsive to every requirement demanded of a Nation-wide fleet of firefighting aircraft. But, if every other year there is a “paradigm shift” in U.S.F.S. policies that govern aerial firefighting it will ultimately destroy the industry once again. Our Nation can ill afford such an outcome.
The realities of todays threat environment make all firefighting agencies a vital component of our country’s Civil Defense Force. Since no military unit of any size will ever be solely dedicated to the single mission of firefighting that responsibility has been dutifully filled by our industry companies. They should not be run into bankruptcy by the stroke of some bureauocratic pen.
If a Nation-wide fire plan could be married to the needs of regional firefighting agencies our goals would soon be realized and achieved.