Unauthorized use is prohibited.Īnother potential danger for firefighting aircraft are unauthorized civilian drones, experts say, since low-flying firefighting aircraft are automatically grounded whenever these drones are spotted.

Before guiding huge planes with huge loads of fire retardant, these Broncos make sure the jet’s path is clear, that no updrafts, shifting columns of smoke, hidden terrain, or other obstacles could place the massive aircraft and its three-person crew in danger. Leading the jet was a highly maneuverable, Vietnam-era OV-10 Bronco plane. Big help from aboveĪbove the deadly El Dorado Fire burning east of Los Angeles in September, a retrofitted 747 jumbo jet flying low over the treetops released 18,000 gallons of bright red fire retardant to slow the progress of the fast-moving wildfire. And the Dragon Eggs they dropped enabled the backfire to cover a strip of land that was 300 to 400 feet wider, which made it a much more effective barrier against the spread of the wildfire. “A bonus is you can do nighttime ops and work in smoky conditions, because if a drone crashes, no one dies,” Weibel notes.Īt the Point Reyes fire, the drones were “a good safety tool for getting in where it was too thick or too steep for the firefighters,” says Suarez. The eggs can set fires ahead of an advancing wildfire in hard-to-reach places, denying it fuel. The reaction between the two chemicals ignites the spheres after they hit the ground. The balls explode on impact with the ground, setting small fires known as backfires.Įach of the one-inch spheres, called Dragon Eggs, contains potassium permanganate, and just before they are released they are given a pin injection of anti-freeze. The small balls are pin-injected with antifreeze, which reacts with the ethylene glycol inside. Once loaded up with a carrier, the drone can release 450 incendiary devices in less than four minutes. He brought along a funnel-shaped attachment for the underside of a drone, a device that can release 450 ping-pong-ball-sized incendiary devices in less than four minutes. Simon Weibel, another longtime firefighter who now works for a company called Drone Amplified, joined Suarez that day. Human-piloted aircraft could not risk flying into the coastal fog and the smoke. He was using the six-rotor aerial vehicle, equipped with thermal imaging, to map the fire, which covered 5,000 acres then. In August, Suarez was flying an M-600 drone over the Woodward Fire on the Point Reyes National Seashore. We don’t have the pilots or aircraft to meet the needs now,” says Joe Suarez, a drone specialist with the National Park Service and superintendent of the Arrowhead Hot Shot fire crew in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains. “We’re getting a significant increase in requests this year.

That’s twice as many as last year, when the federal Wildfire Management Technology Act was signed into law to allow more drones to be used to fight wildfires.

Arrival of the dronesīecause of their size and maneuverability, drones can access places that fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters can’t, making them arguably the greatest innovation in firefighting this year.Īt least 30 pilots guiding some two dozen drones are fighting wildfires in Oregon, California, Colorado, and elsewhere. However, in an age where climate change is promoting more and bigger fires that consume millions of acres in a single season, the profession of firefighting must be quicker, safer, and cover greater ground- even as a spreading pandemic makes the work that much harder.

The best tools are often simple ones: water hoses, bulldozers, brush-clearing axes. An array of new and existing technologies has been pulled into the fray-including fireball-dropping drones and repurposed passenger jets-to enhance ground-based, time-tested techniques.įighting fires still depends on cutting firebreaks, setting backfires, and spraying water. As unprecedented wildfires ravage California and much of the West, firefighters have taken innovative steps to try to keep up with the flames.

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