Heavy air tankers could come back

GRANTS PASS, Ore. - The small planes and heavy helicopters that stepped in to fight wildfire across the West last year after the U.S. Forest Service stopped using big air tankers for safety reasons will be back again this year, the Bush administration's top forest official said Wednesday.

And 20 heavy air tankers or more will be back on the job if an analysis to be completed by June 1 shows they are safe to fly, Agriculture Department Undersecretary Mark Rey said in a telephone interview from Portland.

"We actually achieved a higher rate of success on initial attack with the reconfigured fleet we used last year than we had in previous years," Rey said. "That having been said, we still believe the large tankers are useful tools. They are more cost-efficient than helicopters to fly."

The Forest Service and the Interior Department terminated $30 million in contracts with private companies for all 33 planes in the heavy air tanker fleet last year after the National Transportation Safety Board advised their airworthiness could not assured. Three such planes crashed between 1994 and 2002, killing seven crew members.

Federal agencies filled in with more single engine air tankers - crop dusters used to spray fire retardant - and heavy and medium helicopters. The 99.09 percent rate of success at stopping fires while they were still small, known as initial attack, exceeded the rate of 98.3 percent in 2003, according to the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho.

During the 2004 season, eight P-3 Orions, former Navy submarine chasers converted to fight forest fires, were returned to service on the basis of Navy records on their air worthiness. Two P-2V and one DC-7 were put on limited service, equipped with instruments to gather data on stresses on their air frames.

Norman Stubbs, maintenance manager for air tanker contractor TMB Inc. in Tulare, Calif., said heavy air tankers are still the best tool for delivering large payloads of fire retardants over long distances to combat fires in heavy forest.

The company is offering three DC-7s and one DC-4s for firefighting duty, Stubbs said.

"They were extremely fortunate last year because they had a very very mild fire season," Stubbs said of the Forest Service. "If they have a big fire season this year, with the limited resources they have, I think they might find themselves in a bit of an awkward position."

Despite continuing drought across much of the West, 2004 was a below-average wildfire season in the lower 48 states, with fewer dry lightning strikes than average and just 61,873 fires burning 1.4 million acres, according to the fire center's end of the season summary. In 2003, 3.4 million acres burned in the lower 48.

The federal government's forecast for the 2005 wildfire season for the West is not expected until April, but National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration drought maps for January show severe to extreme conditions across most of Oregon, southeastern Washington, western Idaho and western Montana.

The Forest Service has called for bids to supply a total of 20 heavy air tankers, said Rose Davis, spokeswoman for the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho. More could be contracted if enough are deemed safe.

The agency has also contracted for six heavy helicopters, 24 medium helicopters and 54 single-engine air tankers, Davis said.

Eight Air Force C-130s equipped to drop fire retardant will also be available if needed, she said. Agreements are in place with states to use six CL-215 and CL-415 air tankers, which scoop water out of lakes to drop on fires.

"That's pretty much like we had last year," she said of this year's fleet.

If more heavy air tankers prove safe to resume firefighting, some of the heavy helicopters will be dropped from the fleet, because the planes are less expensive to operate, Rey said.