Military Planes Take Dry Runs at Fire Season

Rumbling along just shy of a midair stall, the tanker unleashed a white curtain of water that blanketed a stretch of dry grass the length of two football fields.

Another air tanker hovered right behind it. And another still.

Eight Air National Guard and Air Force reserve planes kept up the aerial assault all day Tuesday as part of their spring training in preparation for this year’s wildfire season.

Flying in from military bases in North Carolina, Wyoming and Colorado, the C-130 Hercules cargo planes practiced jettisoning 27,000 pounds of fire retardant on aerial sweeps designed to help ground crews on the fire lines.

“It is sort of a ballet,” said Lt. Col. Ed Bellion, watching the planes stacked up for reloading at the Channel Islands Air National Guard base. “Everybody knows their part.”

The Air National Guard and Air Force Reserve are often called out when raging wildfires outmaneuver commercial air tankers under contract with the U.S. Forest Service and other conservation agencies.

The Channel Islands base, located next to the Point Mugu Navy base south of Oxnard, has two cargo planes equipped with modular tanks that turn them into makeshift air tankers.

Six other cargo planes with similar setups are scattered at bases in Cheyenne, Wyo., Charlotte, N.C., and Colorado Springs. Their pilots know the Channel Islands base and surrounding area. They were here fighting the Malibu fire in 1993.

And now they are back. But this time for a national training session being held for the first time at the 6-year-old Channel Islands base.

“This is the most satisfying kind of flying,” said Capt. Rob Powell, an Air Force reserve pilot who flew in from Colorado Springs.

It’s a humanitarian mission to save lives and property, Powell said. Moreover, Powell said he enjoys the challenge of flying barely 100 feet off the ground, at an airspeed approaching a stall, and then dropping more than a dozen tons of liquid out the back.

“You go from being a slow pig-dog to scooting pretty fast,” said Powell, who normally pilots 727 airliners for TWA. “It’s quite a sensation.”

The well-choreographed flights continued throughout the day, with planes dropping water in canyons and mountainsides in the nearby Santa Monica Mountains and the Los Padres National Forest.

The only snags came during reloading, when ground crews struggled with fussy tanks, hoses and valves that make up the Modular Airborne Firefighting System.

“We’ve got a ruptured disk,” crackled a voice on a hand-held radio. A team of mechanics and trouble-shooters from the U.S. Forest Service and other agencies immediately congregated around the back end of the plane.

The modular tanks are designed to roll into the back of the C-130s so they can transform a cargo plane into an air tanker within hours. The series of five tanks operate like big seltzer bottles, blowing the liquid out of two enormous tailpipes with compressed air.

But the units, built in the late 1960s, seem to offer a never-ending array of problems, ground crews said. As one weekend warrior put it: “We have to keep them together with bubble gum and duct tape.”

Legislation seeking $10 million to replace the units is stalled in Congress.

“In the recent past, wildfires have caused billions of dollars of damage,” Rep. Elton Gallegly (R-Simi Valley) wrote recently to colleagues in a push for his bill. “Funding for [tank] replacements would allow us to be much better prepared for the next catastrophic wildfire season.”