Expanded tanker jets’ value tested

BOISE – Federal fire managers say new supertanker jets being developed by private companies will dramatically increase the amount of fire retardant dropped on wildfires and will work in concert with ground crews and other tanker aircraft.

Now, they are trying to decide if the extra airpower is worth the higher cost.

“You can spend millions of dollars putting out a single stump,” U.S. Forest Service aviation specialist Scott Fisher, chairman of the Interagency Airtanker Board, said Tuesday while watching a modified Boeing 747-200 passenger jet drop 20,500 gallons of water on an empty field during a demonstration flight.

Oregon-based Evergreen International Aviation is trying to persuade federal land managers to add the 747 to the fleet of 16 smaller fixed-wing air tankers used on wildfires around the country each year. Another company, Oklahoma-based Omni Air International, has proposed using a McDonnell Douglas DC-10 it has modified to carry up to 12,000 gallons of water, about half the payload of the 747.

Conventional air tankers can deliver up to 3,000 gallons of water, foam, gel or other retardant on a fire before returning to a base for reloading. Besides bigger payloads, the supertankers would add more range and reduce time between drops, company officials say.

Federal land management agencies have not advertised for bids to supply firefighting supertankers, but after the two companies approached the Forest Service with prototypes, the agency conducted a “Supertanker Operational Assessment Project” to determine whether the larger jets would be an asset.

The preliminary results from flight tests conducted for the Forest Service study show the supertankers can fly low and slow enough to effectively target wildfires without interfering with ground attack operations.

“We believe they will be able to meet most if not all of our requirements for certification,” said Fisher. “They are on track to providing a whole new spectrum of aerial firefighting that we have never seen before.”

But the interagency team evaluating the potential use of supertankers has yet to complete a cost-benefit analysis. The federal government and the companies developing the planes have not negotiated a price for what is expected to be a one-year interim contract to evaluate the aircraft in service this summer.

Evergreen has spent $40 million the past three years designing and converting the 747 passenger jet into a supertanker. The company is distributing its own study that contends the government could have saved $108 million dollars on fighting seven major fires that destroyed 1.4 million acres in 2002 if the supertanker had been used in the initial fire attack.

Evergreen officials say they are not trying to replace the existing fleet of conventional air tankers, for which the federal government has contracted for $17 million this fire season. Instead, they say the supertanker would work in conjunction with existing air tankers and helicopters for a multipronged first assault on wildfires.