Pilots Take On California Blazes With Powerful Aircraft

	Wayne Lannin, a pilot with Helicopter Transport Services Inc., readies for a firefighting flight. (Photo by Michael Milstein)

OTAY MESA, Calif. — On California's border with Mexico, the furnacelike Harris Fire hopscotches ridgetops and cinders anything, including homes, in its path.

Helicopter teams from Oregon are the first line of defense, sucking water from a lake and dumping it in air-raid style sweeps at the fire lin

These chopper teams lead in this risky kind of work, as successfully navigating forests with choppers derives from logging experience in the Pacific Northwest.

Flying from a crumbling and nearly forgotten former Navy airfield near the border, three massive helicopters race through choking smoke and squirrelly winds to throw about 2,000 gallons of water and fire retardant at a time onto one of the most destructive of the Southern California wildfires.

This air force, like a determined fighter squadron, has become a key weapon in the no-holds-barred battle against the blazes laying siege to the region.

Two of the Oregon aircraft were the first large helicopters to reach the Harris fire as fierce winds whipped it into a blast furnace over the weekend, when other air tankers and helicopters were in acutely short supply. Maneuvering through gusts that could ground smaller helicopters and many airplanes, the pilots aided desperate firefighters on the ground as homes and hillsides turned to ashes.

"I've been doing firefighting for 31 years, and flying for a little over 40, and this is as big, as extreme as anything I've seen,'' said Wayne Lannin of Port Orford, Ore., who once flew helicopters for the Los Angeles County Fire Department and now pilots a Sikorsky Skycrane for Helicopter Transport Services Inc. of Corvallis, Ore.

Other helicopters hitting the fire like a thunderous air raid come from Columbia Helicopters in Aurora, Ore., and Evergreen International Aviation in McMinnville, Ore. Oregon is known nationwide for its aerial firefighting muscle, a skill that evolved from helicopter hauling of logs headed for sawmills.

Lannin and co-pilot Brent Keeler of Albany, Ore., dumped water and retardant Wednesday on flames licking at homes — from remote cabins to palatial estates — in the rock-studded hills east of San Diego. The Harris fire turned deadly from the start, killing one person, and has injured more than 30, including firefighters, and turned about 200 homes to cinders.

Winds calmed in recent days and fire bosses cautiously hoped they could contain the blaze sometime next week.

As Lannin and Keeler guzzled Gatorade in a cargo trailer that provided scarce shade on the scorching tarmac, a man they had never seen drove up in a Buick and handed over an armful of fresh Quizno's sandwiches and icy Pepsis.

"No, thank you,'' said the man, Michael Funkhouser, who owns a towing service near the airstrip. "My house is up there,'' he said, pointing to a smoke-shrouded ridge to the north. I've already been evacuated. Thank you for trying to save it.''

The fires even chased Lannin's crew. The team — which carts a fuel truck and trailer full of tools and parts wherever it goes — began working from an airport in Ramona, north of San Diego. Suddenly they looked up to see wind-whipped flames racing toward them.

"It looked like it was coming right to the airport,'' said Ray Willis of Corvallis, the crew chief. "They thought the airport might get overrun.''

The Ramona airport lost power and water. The entire city of about 36,000 was evacuated.

Families moved from their homes to cots and tents in the concrete hallways of the San Diego football stadium and other evacuation centers. Leaders pleaded for citizens to save electricity and water, and avoid using cell phones so they'd be available for firefighting forces. Shopping malls in a region known for its gorgeous weather and perpetual sun stand dark and empty amid a pall of choking brown smoke.

"It's unreal — we're flying over shopping centers where there's not a car in the parking lot,'' said Mark Johnson, a pilot with Columbia Helicopters. He and his crew were ferrying logs in Northern California until they got orders to fly their twin-rotor Boeing Vertol 107 to the fires blowtorching the southern end of the state.

The fires kept one-upping aircraft and fire crews racing in from all directions.

"First there were eight fires in San Diego,'' said Jerry Cimini, a U.S. Forest Service helibase manager. "The next day there were 13. So it was like, 'When is it going to stop?''' He said the helicopters were vital in defending houses.

The Evergreen and Helicopter Transport Services aircraft work under contract to the U.S. Forest Service throughout the summer, chasing flames from Georgia to Idaho.

Indeed, with drought stalking the West, there's almost no place the fire-fighting choppers haven't been.

But each fall they are likely to end up in Southern California, where devilish, house-rattling winds howl off the desert and fan the slightest spark into an inferno.

Willis points to a map taped to the ceiling of the crew's trailer, covered with push pins.

"We've been to a lot of other places,'' he says, with a note of apology. "But we ran out of push pins.''

(Michael Milstein is a staff writer for The Oregonian of Portland, Ore. He can be contacted at michaelmilstein(at)news.oregonian.com.)

The Ka-27, used in utility role as the Ka-32, has a lifting capacity of around 8,000 lbs.

The S64-F can do 25,000 lbs.

Many jobs don't require the crane however, so a lessor lift will do in many circumstances. Plus, it's way cheaper.

But if you want a LOT of water, you gotta go with the crane.

Agreed.
There aren’t a lot of S-64s around, and the Kamov is still in production and being used to good effect.
I suspect we could pick up Kamov’s relatively cheap.

Way more cranes than Kamovs are flying. There are only 9 Ka-32’s outside the curtain, 2 in US, 2 in Canada. There are 59 Cranes flying, with the ability to build/modify more.

It is my understanding that the 747 has 4 nozzles, each a foot in diameter, that point down and back. Each projects a nearly solid column of water, which adds about 12,500 pounds of thrust to the aircraft (total 50,000 pounds of thrust).

This has the effect of cancelling the forward motion of the aircraft, with respect to to the slipstream, so the water column actually experiences less of a slipstream than water dropped directly into the slipstream by a slower aircraft.

As I mentioned before, Evergreen has demonstrated that the 747 can deliver large volumes of water to the ground as a liquid from 800' AGL. This is something that no other American fire bomber can do.

Really?

I thought a good number of Kamovs were being sold lately.

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