It’s time to raise the bar on training and safety in aerial firefighting
As wildfires intensify, so too must the standards for training and safety
Wildland firefighting seasons are growing longer and more intense. Despite this, requirements for aerial firefighting training have remained mostly unchanged for decades. What more must be done to ensure operational excellence, safety and reliability in the decades to come?
Today’s standards
To become an aerial firefighting pilot of a Single Engine Air Tanker (SEAT)--whether the plane is on wheels or in Fire Boss configuration on floats–an individual must meet extensive minimum flight time requirements for a wide variety of training experiences–such as mountainous flying, low-level flying and low-level dispersal flying. Once a pilot meets these minimums on their own, they can enter the industry and find an operator to work with. The operator that hires the new pilot is obligated to provide additional training in some fundamental areas of aerial firefighting, which include:
Written manuals and a few hours of classroom instruction, covering Airmen General Training and “Basic Indoctrination”. Airmen General Training encompasses foundational piloting skills–such as navigation, weather, air traffic control, automated flight following and crew/single-pilot resource management. “Basic Indoctrination” is more specific to aerial firefighting and is delivered to pilots through written manuals that detail a pilot’s duties and responsibilities, contract specifications, operations, accident review procedures and standards for airtanker base operations and aerial supervision.
A combination of additional classroom time plus a few hours in the cockpit to learn aircraft ground, flight and emergency procedures.
Once these steps are complete and the pilot meets the minimums to be contract compliant, it doesn’t mean that they’re immediately ready to work successfully in a Fire Traffic Area (FTA). In addition, once they’re in the industry, there are relatively few federal standards in place to ensure their continual, long-term training and development–beyond annual recurrent training in the areas listed above, which cover basic, fundamental skills. Beyond these requirements, it’s up to each individual aerial firefighting operator to decide for itself what additional training is needed to keep their people safe and sharp.
What more does it take to become mission-ready?
“The federal minimum is deemed acceptable, but we opt to give our people a more robust training onramp to the season, so they can get back up to speed in their respective role, regain their proficiency and be mission-ready by springtime,” said Brett L’Esperance, CEO, Dauntless Air. “That’s why our pre-season training spans 2 straight weeks and involves every person in our company. Pilots, mechanics, crew chiefs, leadership and administrative staff all gather together and go through live simulated fire dispatches with external partners working as Air and Ground Attack coordinators. That’s the type of training that takes you beyond a ‘meet the minimums’ exercise to an actual performance enhancer.”
Drawing from our experience training some of the top Fire Boss pilots, mechanics and crew chiefs in the world, we see four areas of training that should become the industry standard, in particular for SEAT and water scooper operations. If every operator holds themselves accountable to these modern practices, we can lift safety and efficacy performance metrics across the industry.
Go beyond the contractually required training minimums
“At Dauntless, we want to be the best and safest partner we can be on day 1 of a wildfire season, getting the most out of every fuel cycle, making every drop count, and doing it all in accordance with industry-leading best practices for safety,” said Jesse Weaver, Chief Pilot and Director of Operations, Dauntless Air. “While we cover the contractually required classroom training, we decided years ago that we need to go above and beyond that minimum, so we expanded the classroom portion of our training and added a significant number of training and proficiency live-flying scenarios to our 2-week program. Flight simulators can be helpful in a training environment, but nothing compares to actual flight time.”
“We fly between 120 and 140 hours in the pre-season and upwards of 140 sorties–which are mission-like scenarios,” said Weaver. “And it’s not just our pilots practicing. Mechanics are onsite maintaining the aircraft and taking additional maintenance-related classes. Crew chiefs are there as well simulating dispatches and loading aircraft as if it’s fire season. It gives everyone a chance to work on their technical skills and ability to collaborate and work as a team. Our goal is to be a well-oiled, mission-ready machine before the season even starts.”
Additional flight time is important for everyone, but especially for new pilots. Across the industry, new Fire Boss pilots typically fly only 7 to 10 hours before the wildfire season starts.
“It’s really difficult to evaluate and train up a new pilot in the standard 7 to 10 hours of flight time,” said Weaver. “At Dauntless, we’ve doubled that. We have new Fire Boss pilots fly between 20 and 30 hours in the pre-season, which includes flying with an experienced pilot in our two-seat Fire Boss as well as logging solo hours. The time spent flying with an experienced colleague is invaluable for the new Fire Boss pilot and operator alike.”
Weaver added, “Two-seat Fire Bosses didn’t exist when I did my new pilot training around two decades ago. Instead, like all Fire Boss pilots at the time, I was trained over the radio by someone sitting in a boat below me. Naturally, there are limitations in that approach and it caused me to pick up a few bad habits that took several seasons to unlearn. There’s no reason for a new pilot to go through that today – simply put, it isn’t a safe and effective approach to Fire Boss training. Operators can and should acquire a two-seater to ensure an optimal training environment.”
It’s impossible to fully replicate a fire environment while training, but additional flight time and sorties allow an operator to see how a new Fire Boss pilot performs under a variety of conditions and expectations, including formation flying with other Fire Bosses, mountain flying and how to safely integrate into the FTA with other aircraft and operators.
“Not every pilot makes it through initial training,” said Weaver. “But it’s far better for everyone to find that out in a training environment rather than an active fire in the middle of a season. For the folks who do make it through, we believe that investing in their development with many more training hours makes them smarter, safer and more effective when they do start working during the fire season. In fact, we’ve found that the extra investment of time and money leads to less down time during the season, because we encounter far fewer pilot-induced maintenance problems, which has the knock-on benefit of keeping that aircraft on contract and ready to fly every day for our customers.”
Make multi-crew training the norm
No one team puts out a wildfire. Every mission involves possibly dozens of assets and people from different agencies and companies all working together to attack a threat. This reality is reflected in the best pre-season training agendas.
“We are just one tool in the firefighting tool box,” said Weaver. “Sometimes we’re the hammer; sometimes we’re the file. Since we need to be ready to work with other tools, in whatever way best supports the fire tactics of the day, we put our people through collaborative, mission-like training scenarios whenever possible.”
For example, during our 2021 and 2022 training sessions, Dauntless brought in an Air Attack platform to fly above the target training area and work with pilots on radio communication skills. While one group of Dauntless pilots worked with the Air Attack platform, a few miles away another group of Dauntless pilots worked with incident commanders (ICs) on the ground from the Texas Forest Service, giving both Dauntless and the ICs practice in calling in aircraft and performing rapid initial attack on a simulated fire drop zone. All-in-all, 75 Dauntless crew members were involved in training sessions with 31 Texas Forest Service ICs as well as multiple stakeholders from the US Office of Aviation Services (OAS) and Bureau of Land Management (BLM).
“When we practice together, we get better together,” said Weaver. “It’s an invaluable investment. And when it’s combined with all of our other safety and training tactics, it helps to elevate our operational excellence and make us a safer, more effective and more reliable team player.”
Prioritize full-spectrum safety
Training shouldn’t stop at the traditional areas that make us effective aerial firefighters. Safety and pre-season preparations should extend to life at the tanker base, where pilots and crew chiefs from various operators live for weeks and months at a time.
“We cover all areas of training that will make us a better operator, like preparing and loading the aircraft pre-mission, formation flying, drop precision, radio communication skills and scoop location assessment and decision making,” said L’Esperance. “On top of that, we cover a lot of other topics in the classroom that make us a better team to have on a tanker base. We want our people to be able to help keep themselves and others safe in any scenario – in the air, on the ground, or out in the community.”
In recent years, Dauntless has expanded areas of training to include:
Leadership and effective team building
CPR
Extensive Human Factors training
“Reading” of water and natural navigation
Tanker base etiquette & model behaviors training
How to assist a downed aircraft (in the Dauntless fleet or third-party)
Mental health and how to cope with mental stress should you or a colleague be involved in an unsafe scenario
Live flight time and sand table exercises that bring more value to required training materials, such as:
Emergency scenarios, including emergency egress, water ditching, asymmetrical scoop identification & procedures, upset recovery, emergency procedures while scooping and loss of direction control while scooping
Mission skills, including fire behavior & tactics and procedures for fire communications and FTA
First aid & survival skills, including the use of personal protective equipment
Next-level piloting skills, such as formation flying & standards and rough water scooping
“It is imperative that we give our people the skills to succeed and come home safe every day and throughout the season,” said L’Esperance. “It’s a responsibility we take incredibly seriously, and I believe our commitment is reflected in the rigor of our training and approach to safety.”
Shape a safety culture
At Dauntless, we believe that organizational culture has a bigger impact on safety outcomes than even the Safety Management System (SMS) that’s in place to capture issues and results. After all, an SMS is only as effective as the data that feeds it. If pilots, mechanics, crew chiefs, office staff are afraid to speak up when they see or commit safety missteps, it is impossible to ensure a true system of safety.
“We’re human. We can’t totally eliminate the possibility of mistakes, incidents and accidents, but we can drastically reduce their likelihood when everyone in the company is committed to the idea of continuous improvement and safety,” said L’Esperance. “We want people to speak up when they see an issue. That gives us the ability to diagnose the problem, fix it and ensure it never happens again.”
The Dauntless safety culture is expressed in some key ways.
Meetings on lessons learned. Every pre-season training includes multiple sessions in which our pilots, mechanics and crew chiefs gather for honest and transparent conversations about the things that went wrong or could have been done better in previous seasons. The team discusses challenging situations together and identifies opportunities for improvement in the upcoming season. Because Dauntless crew members and pilots come from a variety of backgrounds–including military, agricultural spraying and transport–everyone has a unique perspective and set of learnings to bring to the table, which helps the team improve faster together.
Top-down leadership. Lessons Learned meetings always begin with a member of the leadership team reflecting on their own missteps and opportunities for improvement. Safety knows no hierarchy.
Commitment to team. There’s a lot that can be learned about teamwork, accountability and safety from other companies and industries. That’s why we bring in speakers to talk about their experiences building cohesive, productive and safe teams.
“Safety culture doesn’t just happen overnight; it’s something you have to work on day in and day out,” said L’Esperance. “I’m extremely proud of the work we do to maintain a safe and just culture.”
Until federal and state agencies increase standards and funding for training, it is up to individual operators to raise the bar for themselves. As the wildfire threat intensifies and impacts more Americans, the stakes are too high for giving this anything less than our very best.
Contact us today to learn more about how our approach to training and safety translates to operational excellence and reliability on day-1 of wildfire season.