Tight Brotherhood Shaken by Air Tanker Pilot Deaths

In the worst cases, the haze and the smoke cloud visibility, the heat warps the air and the wind blows everything every which way. You know going in it’s going to be bad, and you hope your 40-year-old surplus-part plane hangs together and there’s not a mountain hidden inside the smoke.

This wasn’t a worst case.

“I’ve never seen anything like it. I’ve been doing this 26 years and never saw anything like it,” said Bob Valette, who was flying Tanker 86. “I was setting up for the drop, my eighth drop of the day. Getting ready to go down. Lars was supposed to follow, so he was right next to me. I looked over at him once, and he was right where he was supposed to be. I’m on the downwind leg, opposite the drop. I’m flying in perfectly clear, smooth air. It’s just a ho-hum run. No bumps, no smoke. I look out, and there’s Larry coming right at him, right at Lars. That’s when I went horrified.”

Air tankers 87 and 92, piloted by Larry Groff and Lars Stratte, collided above a grass fire in southern Mendocino County on Monday. Both men died.

The air tanker community is a tiny fraternity of veteran pilots. There are fewer than 100 of them nationwide. Almost all are men, many of them combat veterans. They don’t need to be reminded it is dangerous work.

In such a small group, every death strikes a chord that rumbles through the small world they inhabit. There’s been a lot of rumbling. From 1958 through last week, 146 tanker pilots, helicopter pilots and crew had been killed fighting fires. Groff and Stratte were Nos. 147 and 148. Friday, when a helicopter crashed on a routine flight at a wildfire in Montana, Nos. 149, 150 and 151 were added to the list, making it one of the deadliest weeks ever for pilots.

Everybody in the business at one time or another does the math, some more often than others, said Bob Wofford, chairman of the national Associated Airtanker Pilots. After running the numbers, most pilots make one additional calculation, he said. “We all think it’s not going to happen to us.”

Last week’s crashes make that answer harder to believe, occurring as both did during mundane operations, presumably as far from danger as you can get in this business. Monday’s crash just northwest of Hopland remains inexplicable even, or especially, to those who witnessed it.

“A freak,” Valette called it. “I’ve seen four pilots die previously. Personally, I’ve seen ‘em die. In those cases, every one, they pushed the limit, tried to do too much. I’m going down next, where the danger is, and I watched ‘em. This didn’t have any of that. This was like going to lunch someplace.”

Flying any sort of aircraft involves an assertion of control over tons of wire, rubber and metal. Maintaining that control is the essence of flight safety. Fighting wildfires with planes requires the deliberate sacrifice of some of that control.

“Operating an airplane, you’re always trying to preserve your safety envelope,” Wofford said. “Operating an air tanker, you’re pushing it to the edge of the envelope all the time. You’re going low and slow. It’s hot. You’re near max gross weight on the aircraft. You want to go as slow as possible, not too far above stall speed.”

Fire pilots typically work five to six months of the year. Most work under contract to private companies that in turn contract with state and federal agencies. Pay varies by company, but most pilots receive a basic standby pay of $1,000 to $1,500 per week, plus per diem pay for food and lodging. Pilots are additionally paid as much as $100 per hour of flight time.

They are usually assigned for the duration of a fire season to one of dozens of what are called Air Attack bases scattered around fire country in the West. They work six-day weeks. A short day is 10 hours. Most of that time is spent like most time at most firehouses: Pilots sit around waiting for a call.

Once it comes, they’re up and in the air in minutes. Unlike most states, California keeps its fleet of fire tankers loaded with retardant even while parked on the ground. Other states and the federal government prefer not to add the additional stress to the aging airframes of the planes they use. Most air tankers are surplus military planes, bought at auction and retrofitted with tanks to carry the retardant.

Many of the airplanes--including those involved in Monday’s accident--were manufactured in the 1950s for use in the Korean War. A handful are an additional 10 years older--older in many cases than the pilots. “If you see those go up in the air, you think World War II,” said Chuck Abshear, an assistant chief with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.

The largest of the planes can carry 3,000 gallons of retardant, the smallest a third that amount. The retardant itself is a basic phosphate fertilizer, colored with an iron oxide to make it easier to see and mixed with water into a watery sludge. It is dumped through computer-controlled hatches that are able to vary the pace of the drop.

Once a fire call comes into a base, the planes scramble into the air. How many depends on the size and severity of the fire.

California is more aggressive than many other places, typically putting up more planes for smaller fires (as small as five acres) than would be employed elsewhere. This is due in part to the state’s immense population and the increased likelihood that almost any fire here can threaten people and property.

The Hopland fire in which Monday’s deaths occurred was by Western standards a very small one--just 250 acres. State officials say it was kept small in large measure because of their aggressive response. Six tankers and three helicopters, along with a 10th aircraft to observe and control the activity, were dispatched.

Once tankers arrive for what pilots call the “air show,” they await instructions from the command plane. They fly counterclockwise in a square orbit 1,000 feet or more above the fire. Pilots typically descend to about 150 feet above the treetops to make their drops.

Depending on terrain, it is usually preferable to drop the retardant downhill (so the plane has more margin for error in leaving) and upwind (to limit the spread). Retardant is not usually dropped directly on the fire, but more often ahead of it to help build a containment line.

Pilots try not to fly into the fire’s smoke, although sometimes this is unavoidable. The planes “are not nimble at all,” Wofford said, often not allowing the pilot to do maneuvers he might think most effective.

“In these flights, you can really go work an airplane, where most commercial aviation is just takeoffs and landings. This is a lot of yanking and banking and stick and rudder,” pilot Bill Buckley said.

“It’s as close to combat flying as you can be without combat,” said Doug Baker, one of the pilots working the Hopland fire.

Wofford flew for Air America--a company affiliated with the CIA--in Southeast Asia for seven years during the Vietnam War.

“The big difference in this is that nobody’s shooting at you, but in a lot of ways that was safer,” he said.

Military analysts often describe battlefields as messy environments where nothing works as expected.

That is where the similarity to a fire is strongest, pilots said. You’re flying as low as 100 feet, not high enough to dodge a medium pop fly, in a clumsy aircraft. Sometimes you have no choice but to go into the smoke, not knowing what it obscures. More often, Wofford said, you’re in the haze, which is almost as dangerous because you think you can see when you can’t.

To a man, the pilots say they accept all of this for the thrill. Maybe it’s the adrenaline rush, said Wofford, who is 67 and not giving the slightest consideration to retirement.

Larry Groff was 55. He lived in Windsor and flew out of Sonoma. He was born in Missouri. He had two grown daughters and was married to Christine, who has a son, Mick Wells, 16. He was an avid hockey father for his stepson.

Groff flew transport planes for 27 years in the Navy, said Don Uboldi, Department of Forestry’s Air Attack Battalion Chief in Sonoma County. He tried working for the Department of Motor Vehicles in the off-season to make money, but he hated it. He jumped at the opportunity two years ago to fly aid missions to Africa, and did that for the last two off-seasons.

“He was the chef around here,” Uboldi says. “He spent almost the whole day cooking. He had bags full of groceries when he got here, every day. He’d get in and start cooking breakfast. No cereal, no sandwiches. He would sit around and eat breakfast until noon or 1, and then these guys would start cooking dinner.”

Services for Groff are scheduled for 10 a.m. Tuesday at the Sonoma County Airport.

Lars Stratte was 45. He lived in Redding and flew out of the Chico Air Attack Base. He was married to Terri Ann and had two teenage sons, Ian and Tryg. He had flown express mail flights and medical airlifts before joining the forestry department unit in March 1999.

“Lars was our dugout lawyer, the guy on the baseball team who was always telling us the rules and regulations,” said fellow pilot Buckley. “He had been around firefighting for a long time before he joined the force, and he jumped in with both feet.”

Services for Stratte are scheduled for 11 a.m. Monday at Bethel Church in Redding.

Valette trained both men when they joined the air attack unit. He was close friends with Groff.

Valette returned to the Hopland crash scene two days after the accident. “I wanted to see it again, to make sure it was clear in my mind how it happened,” he says.

“I circled the fire just at the same altitude I was flying, and I pointed out where I was and where Lars was. I had to see why I couldn’t see it coming out my window. I needed to see it again.”

Sitting at a table in the Sonoma Air Attack Base kitchen, Valette reenacted the crash. He was speaking to a room full of people, but, really, was speaking as much to himself:

A plastic cookie container is the fire. He circles counterclockwise with his finger. “As I’m doing my checklist, I see Lars following me. Larry was coming to join the orbit from Ukiah. We’re heading west, and Larry is heading east, and they just collide,” he says.

The practice in California is for a pilot to announce himself when he is three minutes away from joining an orbit. Valette can’t remember ever hearing Groff call.

“Lars makes two spins to the ground. Larry just pitched and came straight down. . . . It’s a hell of a collision, two planes hitting at 300 mph. . . . It’s just like it’s not really happening. It was in slow motion until the planes came down. And there was just crap flying around in the air forever. I turned my plane into it. I can’t tell you why, I just rolled right into the debris field. I was screaming, telling them the whole time: ‘Midair! Midair!’ ”

A fund has been established to aid the families of the two pilots. Donations may be sent to: Associated Air Tanker Pilots Memorial Trust Fund, Newhart Bookkeeping, 711D Healdsburg Ave., Healdsburg, CA 95448.

*

RELATED STORY

Under control: California’s fire season has been the mildest of recent years, at least so far. B1