Crews Fighting Huge Brush Fires Get Help From Above

Gordon Koenig may or may not have been playing his guitar while he was on standby for Neptune Aviation in Missoula, Mont. But there is no doubt he had a purple guitar pick with him--his good-luck piece.

At 11:30 that morning, a voice came over the loudspeaker and ordered the crew to load his Lockheed P-2V5 with 11 tons of flame retardant and for Koenig, 51, and his co-pilot, Paul Yedinak, 49, to take off within 15 minutes.

At the same time, someone was rushing a “resource order” to Koenig that would tell him where he was going and who he would need to call on the radio once in range of the Sage fire burning on the outskirts of Ketchum.

As stirring as that sounds, Koenig downplayed the call to action.

“It’s not that dramatic,” he said.

He also downplayed the danger in his work. He said that during the 1990s, the seasonal average of fatal crashes of air tankers was 1 in 40.

“There were 40 air tankers in service during the 1990s, and we were losing one air crew a year.”

In the 12 years he’s been flying tankers to battle wildfires, Koenig has lost 14 friends to crashes.

He had high praise for his airplane, a P-2V5 built in 1952, modified by adding tanks for retardant that empty through six bomb-bay doors, which can be opened one at a time. His P-2V5 can make several drops, rationing the 2,350 gallons of retardant.

The plane is powered by two radial engines and two jet engines, but the jets are only used in takeoff and climbing.

The radial engines are the most powerful made, he said, but since the plane, originally built to patrol shorelines for submarines, is “extremely heavy,” the jets were put onto the P-2V5s as an afterthought.

Despite the age and weight of the plane, Koenig said, it is “built like a bridge, is extremely tough and has enormous power.”

Given the choice of any plane to fly, he said the P-2V5 is his No. 1.

“I am very happy with it, knowing it won’t fall apart on me,” he said. “And it climbs like a homesick angel.”

Airplanes falling apart in flight is a real concern for tanker pilots.

“This kind of work is hard on airplanes,” he said. “They take a beating each time they go out.”

Koenig described the turbulence around a fire as if it were water that slams the aircraft around instead of just air. But the air buffets tankers with sufficient force to blow an engine or the hydraulics, or to tear a plane apart.

One aircraft, the Fairchild C-119 Flying Boxcar, is no longer used as a tanker, he said.

“The wings kept falling off--literally departing the plane,” he said.

He said the P-2V5 was built with an alloy no longer used. Newer planes that are used as tankers, like the Lockheed P-3 Orion and the Lockheed Martin C-130 Hercules, are more prone to metal corrosion and cracking in the wing spars because the alloy is not as strong, he said.

Koenig paid homage to the firefighters on the ground, saying, “We don’t put fires out on our own. We’re there for just a brief time. We’re there to support the ground troops on the line.”

For everyone’s safety, a lead spotter plane flies low to a fire zone to see where the flames and the firefighters are located. The pilot of that plane shows tanker pilots the way in and out of their target, alerting them to ground hazards such as power lines, and controlling traffic with other planes and helicopters.

Knowing the entry and exit route over a target is especially important for flying through smoke, which, Koenig said, is like a thick fog.

“You can’t see anything,” he said, “and you don’t want to be surprised by a mountainside once you’re through.”

Not at the 120 knots Koenig was flying at Ketchum. That speed is equivalent to 180 mph.

Dropping the retardant--a mixture of the fertilizer disodium phosphate and iron oxide for coloring--is the critical moment for a tanker.

“We want to put it where the guys need it,” Koenig said. “We don’t risk our necks to get it there to miss the target, so we fly low. The optimal altitude is 150 feet. Any higher, and it’s difficult to predict where the retardant will go.”

If he drops his entire load at once, his P-2V5 becomes 11 tons lighter in seconds, giving the plane “tremendous lift.”

“You levitate, almost, when you drop so many tons,” he said.

The retardant, described as a sludge or mud, slams into the ground with enough force to kill or gravely injure firefighters if they should accidentally be underneath.

If a tanker is empty after a drop, the pilot is directed to an airport for refilling, and he goes through the routine of finding a safe way in and out of his drop zone again.

Or he may be directed to another fire.

Koenig said he has fought as many as 12 fires in one day, which, because of Federal Aviation Administration rules, cannot exceed eight hours of flying time.

He said he couldn’t estimate the average number of dispatches he gets in a season since it varies so widely, but he remembers last year as his busiest with 985,000 gallons of retardant.

That translates into 402 sorties.