Air Attack magazine: AFUE: Moving towards more effective aerial firefighting

By Michael Archer

As the numbers of acres burned, structures destroyed, lives lost, and dollars spent continue to increase, the U.S. Forest Service has finally taken the first steps towards revamping their way of conducting aerial firefighting operations and the result is called the Aerial Firefighting Use and Effectiveness (AFUE) study.

As wildfires worsen across the western U.S., there have been many debates about how better to deal with them. Over the years, a number of studies have been done on the effectiveness of aerial firefighting, but seldom have they had much impact on strategy and tactics on the firelines. In some cases, newer technology has not been embraced, but simply shifted off to the side while tried-and-true methods of firefighting, while possibly less effective, were used to battle fires that have continued to grow in acreage year after year.

Click the button below to read the full article.