Fire Flight

by John J. Nance

  “In other words, you guys don’t like rules.”

  “No. Not true. We…just like to comply with them in our own way, at our own pace.”

  Not that Sam wasn’t right about the need for checklists and better coordination and smooth teamwork. But it was a bummer to be told by an ex-military jock how to apply an art form invented by civilian pilots to begin with.

  Even more irritating, he reminded himself, was the fact that Congress was threatening to give the whole show to the Air Force Reserves and wipe out an entire industry—seasonals and all—an event that would end his job as well.

  Jerry Stein, the owner of the old Doug DC-6 he was flying, was completely panicked. Most of Stein’s money came from the annual Forest Service fire contracts awarded to the lowest bidder. Stein had been frantically lobbying the entire Montana congressional delegation for months now, begging them to oppose the move.

  Not that I care, Maxwell thought.

  Well, he did care about Jerry, he corrected himself. Too many years of friendship not to. But he had reached the personal conclusion that it was time to bring in the military or some steady professional team with enough money for newer airplanes and decent training. The airtanker industry was falling apart, which was one of the reasons he’d given up dropping retardant four years ago and pledged to stay in retirement.

  The other reason for his escape he remembered all too well: the constant feeling of being stalked by fate. Having survived seventeen seasons, the statistical realities were creeping up on him like a tiger in the dark. Clark remembered the night some four years ago when he’d fed the number of crashes and deaths into a pocket calculator and realized that after twenty years of aerial fire fighting his chances of survival would be no better than 50 percent. A chill had shuddered through him, and he made the decision to quit on the spot. Not even smokejumping was as dangerous.

  So what the hell are you doing here, Maxwell? he thought to himself as he tweaked the throttles, the question finding no ready answer other than the memory of Jerry Stein’s impassioned call for help two months ago. He was short three captains, Jerry had whined, and would face death-by-contract-cancellation if his “best captain” didn’t relent. Clark’s resulting snap decision to come out of retirement and roll the dice once more seemed very strange in hindsight. Jerry had never been that persuasive, but he’d somehow discerned during Clark’s weakest moment that his early retiree was missing the fraternity and the danger and the smoke. With the realization, Jerry had played him like a well-hooked trout.

  “Okay, Jere,” Clark had said after the sixth phone call, “you wore me down. But only for this one season!” He’d replaced the receiver feeling both startled and pleased that he was going to get away from four years of chasing temporary flying jobs around the globe, an itinerant existence that had begun to wear on him.

  There was still the dream of running the flight-training department of some college or university someday, but that would first require a return to the real world. Maybe another season of firefighting was a good beginning. Maybe, he’d mused, when the season was over, he might even muster enough courage to leave professional flying altogether and apply to an enormous state university somewhere to teach forestry and aerial fire fighting. Perhaps he could even teach a course about the history of aerial fire fighting, a little-understood profession barely fifty years old. Years back he’d spent almost one entire winter researching the origins of the idea, if for no other reason than to dispel some of the myths. It turned out to be a fascinating anthology. The idea of dropping incendiary things from airplanes in order to start fires and destroy things dated from World War I. But the idea of using the same air machines to put out fires was a relatively contemporary twist that began in 1953 with the combined efforts of the Forest Service and the state of California.

  The practice of dropping parachutists known as smokejumpers to fight small forest fires was a technique first begun in the thirties and early forties, but there had been no way to deliver large quantities of water directly to burning trees in remote areas until a collection of old Air Force bombers was outfitted with tanks to carry water and, later, slurry.

  There were no manuals back then to teach pilots how to fly heavily loaded airplanes down burning canyons at near treetop level, or how to survive the hellish columns of superheated air and amazing hazards such as exploding trees. Most of the techniques were figured out by dangerous trial and error, and the closest body of pilot expertise resided in the crop-dusting industry, a fiercely independent fraternity of agricultural pilots used to keeping themselves alive by their own wits, men who—as a friend of Clark’s once put it as charitably as possible—held a healthy degree of skepticism for other people’s rules.

  Clark chuckled at the memory of his first encounters with the original airtanker pilots. Profane, brave, rough, and scathingly unimpressed with “college pukes” and “fancy, schmancy Air Farce dandies,” they were a frontier bunch in a Wild West show. His checkout as captain of a modified DC-4—an earlier, shorter version of the DC-6 and DC-7—had been a single flight in the left seat with a tobacco-spitting owner-instructor, and his first flight to a fire had been with an assigned first officer who held only a mechanic’s license and was slowly dying of emphysema. The man sat in the copilot’s seat sucking on a medical oxygen bottle. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) would have had a collective coronary, but the FAA seldom got involved in airtanker business in the early days. The whole shaky affair was between the Forest Service and the pilots, and the FAA was more than happy to look the other way.

  Slowly through the late fifties and early sixties, a dozen mom-and-pop aviation companies using ancient aircraft barely saved from the scrap yard began to form a small but very profitable industry. Buying old airplanes from the military for almost nothing and then retrofitting them with tanks and “gates” to release slurry, the airtanker companies began leasing their aircraft, along with pilots, each summer to the various governmental units fighting fires. Bit by bit, the training and the pilots became better and more sophisticated. Year by year the companies gained more political clout and snuggled in bed more closely with the governmental agencies using their services, quietly exuding the attitude that only they could be trusted to deal with an industry they had created.

  And season by season, better techniques were developed for sizing up a fire and using lead-plane pilots to decide the best and safest method of laying down a line of retardant dropped from 150 feet in the air.

  Clark had been there through much of the later learning process, as it slowly evolved into a rule-and procedure-driven business with safety considerations gaining more ground. It was discovered that lead planes flying test runs over a fire gave the pilot time to find hazards as well as to search for the best track and position and the best escape route a big lumbering tanker could use to get out safely. The lead pilot would fly a “dry” run with the tanker in formation behind him, and only after that would the real bombing run occur. The heavily loaded tanker would then roar over a ridge or down a valley just behind the lead plane, as if on an invisible leash.

  “It gives the ground crews time to head off the fire front, or otherwise turn a massive fire toward a less catastrophic destination,” Clark was used to explaining. “We don’t put out the fires, we work with the firefighters on the ground to slow down and contain the fires, and we’re most effective when we get there in the early stages.”

  Helicopters were added in the sixties to take it a step further, some carrying water in large buckets, and some ferrying helitack crews in to attack smaller fires by hand. One of the largest helicopters in the world, the giant Skycrane, was also recruited, an aircraft big enough to carry a tank the size of a small railroad freight car along with the pumps to rapidly suck from a nearby lake a full load of water that could then be dropped on a fire.

  Year by year the abilities of the airtanker pilots as a group became more effective, and year by year—as Clark bitterly recalled—the maintenance an
d the state of repair of the aging tankers seemed to become progressively less reliable.

  “Why on earth does anyone do this job?” a local reporter once asked him with his little tape recorder stopped.

  “The thrill and the accomplishment and, to some extent, the money,” Clark replied, speaking the truth, yet instantly worried that the reporter might print that off-the-record comment and unleash a typical firestorm of protest from the other pilots.

  It was, after all, still a very hazardous business, as insurance companies continually reaffirmed by refusing life insurance to airtanker pilots. Having the wings literally rip off airtankers in flight was, while not routine, unfortunately not unknown. They could all recall the loss of two C-119 Flying Boxcars to wing failure in the early eighties, and every time Clark had to pull up hard from a dangerous run through a flaming valley, that same nagging worry about the metallic sanctity of his craft sat like a patient buzzard on his shoulders, as if waiting for the inevitable moment a hidden crack would suddenly enlarge and engulf the entire structure and remove his wings.

  It was something they seldom discussed openly, since such occurrences were not survivable.

  Clark shook his head to expunge the thoughts and bring himself back to the moment. The lead plane—a specially modified, light twin-engine aircraft crammed full of radios—was banking now a thousand feet below him and soaring over the emerald green carpet of coniferous forest. Clark pulled the four throttles of the DC-6B back and slowed, preparing to follow. He’d use the usual forty-five degree descending left bank to reverse course from east to west and line up on the leading edge of the fire, then eyeball the release point, while tracking the lead plane visually. When the moment felt exactly right and he had the wind conditions and drift figured, he’d toggle the remaining heavy red retardant out of the belly of the old converted Douglas airliner and pull up. Hopefully, the slurry would hit the threatened trees just beyond the swath of retardant he’d already laid down. So far, the line was holding, despite the size and intensity of a fire this big, and the dozers were getting closer.

  They could still lose it, though, Clark thought. Leave it to the Forest Service to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory again by waiting too long to call for the limited number of available airtankers. This one had been another classic case of a young incident commander experienced only with small fires being reluctant to call for the airtanker fleet lest he be criticized. He’d needed a bigger fire before he could be sure.

  Now he had one.

  Of course, there were other factors increasing the annual forest fire stakes, and they all knew it. Wildlands all over the West were feeling the encroachment of new homes and cabins with the owners all demanding complete fire protection. Too often however, those beautiful surrounding forests were filled with dry tinder and brush and deadfall, which too many residents refused to clear away. That made fire season a formula for annual disaster, and a continuous, growing frustration.

  How many times, Clark wondered, had he sat in the standby shack waiting for someone officially to call for airtanker help while a fire they all knew was going to be bad grew from a flicker to a blaze? Too often the call didn’t come until the fire was threatening communities, cabins, and parks. He’d seen the same mistake, year after year, throughout his seventeen seasons, and he’d sat on the sidelines in retirement during the last four years watching the same nonsense until he was bone weary of it.

  “We bomb no fires before their time,” one of the pilots had put it with an appropriate eye roll and a toast. “No junior fires for us. Only full grown, manly, monster fires where dropping ten thousand gallons of retardant is about as effective as pissin’ in the wind.”

  Like the fire he was fighting now, growing larger by the minute east of Jackson Hole.

  I’m going to need to nail it this time, Clark thought. If the blaze jumped the ridge, not even a squadron of airtankers would be enough to save the area.

  And, hit or miss, as soon as the drop was made he’d have to boogie back to West Yellowstone before the fuel got too low. The chances of running so low he’d have to suffer the embarrassment of declaring a fuel emergency and landing at Jackson Hole was extremely unlikely, but it was a reputational nightmare that kept his calculations sharp.

  The other pilots would love something like that, of course. He’d be needled unmercifully by what he had laughingly dubbed the “FLOPPs”—the Fraternal and Learned Order of Perfect Pilots, of which he was a charter member—an acronym his fellow airtanker pilots had declared insulting.

  Fuel’s tight but okay, Clark decided, the low-fuel nightmare gaining ground. Sudden fuel leaks were not unheard of on these old birds. Hopefully we’d notice the levels dropping before the engines got real quiet and she became a glider. He glanced at the fuel gauges again just to be sure, wondering if they’d been calibrated or replaced since the last time he’d flown ship 84. He’d forgotten to check, and suddenly that seemed like a serious oversight. Few of the small items the pilots wrote up were fixed quickly. It was too easy to defer them until the end of the season, when the list of inoperative and questionable things needing repair became staggering.

  Should be fine, Clark reassured himself, banishing the nightmarish thought of dead sticking a fuel-starved four-engine airliner into a geyserinfested Yellowstone valley. The prospect of living through such a forced landing only to boil to death in a superheated geyser pool was a bogus worry, though the FLOPPs loved to terrify new copilots and engineers with the possibility. Truth was, no crew member was likely to survive such a crash landing to begin with.

  Maxwell’s experienced eyes swept the engine instruments again in unconscious routine. All the gauges on Tanker 84 that still worked were giving steady readings, and that was a surprise.

  He knew intimately all of the DC-6s Stein owned by number and personality. He hated flying old T-84, since she was the least dependable of the fleet—a real hangar queen he’d been assigned only because his favorite, Tanker 88, had “gone out of service” at the last minute.

  “Eighty-eight’s in the hangar, Clark. You’ll be taking Tanker Eighty-six, instead,” the operations manager had told him at seven A.M. But at the last second, Jeff Maze and Jeff’s longtime copilot, Mike Head, were switched to Tanker 86, and Clark drew the lemon of the fleet.

  “When do I get Eighty-eight back?”

  “Maybe tomorrow. If you’re reasonably polite to me.”

  Out of all the DC-6s in Jerry Stein’s geriatric fleet, T-88 was Clark Maxwell’s favorite. He’d flown her enough to learn her myriad idiosyncracies. She was a creaky old metallic grandma with a quarter of her flight instruments, and sometimes even the fuel gauges, inoperative. But she was also a flying battlewagon originally designed to carry an infinite number of airline passengers for an infinite number of years.

  He trusted her. And that meant something, especially now.

  When the wing box had suddenly collapsed on an old Lockheed C-130A over a California fire the previous summer, detaching the wings and killing three of his friends, Clark had watched the amateur videotape of the disaster on TV from the safety of his apartment in North Dakota, assuring himself it couldn’t happen to him. His old Doug was far tougher than any of the old 130s. In fact, he wouldn’t hesitate to fly Tanker 88 again—assuming he was dumb enough ever to go back to aerial fire fighting. Everyone knew that the DC-6s were far better built than the old 130s.

  All things were relative, Clark counseled himself. So what if the DC-6B’s fuel gauges were unreliable, or even if half the forward flight panel was inoperative, as long as the wings stayed on.

  He kept track of the fuel in his head anyway—a simple matter of how much fuel he’d departed with versus how long he’d been sucking at the tanks in flight and at what rate. As long as there were no serious fuel leaks in the wings, the calculations were always golden, whether or not the gauges worked.

  Besides, he reminded himself with a grin he knew the copilot wouldn’t understand, when I can read the gauges
, I don’t trust them anyway.

  It was time to turn.

  Clark Maxwell began banking the DC-6 back toward the west, completing the turn and steadying the ship on course in trail to the lead plane. He let the Douglas drop the last four hundred feet to the target altitude that would put him one hundred feet above the ridge a mile and a half ahead. He could see the lead plane disappearing intermittently through smoke plumes as it blazed the aerial trail, and he followed, urging his ancient airliner toward the same hole in the sky.

  The lead plane was a Beech Baron. The Forest Service owned nineteen of them, but all had been grounded six months before for exceeding the maximum lifetime flight hours. Six of the Barons, however, had been specially inspected and returned to service to fly one final season on a waiver, and Sam Littlefox—Lead Four-Two—was flying one of them.

  Maxwell glanced at Josh White again, wondering if Rusty was enjoying his day off. He fully intended to make Rusty pay for leaving him with a greenhorn like White.

  Clark sighed, reminding himself of his instructor responsibilities. If White was supposed to do a better job of participating, maybe Clark should be a good captain and brief him every now and then, not to mention help teach him.

  He hit the interphone button.

  “Josh, I’m going to bring us across the ridge from left to right, then bank right, use left rudder and sideslip a bit down the slope, then bank back toward the slope, then do a tight right bank and pull hard just as I release the load. Then we’ll roll out to the left and fly the escape route.”

  White was nodding, his eyes wide.

  “Okay?” Clark queried.

  The ridge was coming up fast, and White’s eyes were riveted on the eighty-foot trees near the summit.

  “Okay!” White replied at last, still fumbling with the interphone switch.

  Insistent southerly winds had been assaulting Jackson Hole and the Tetons for the past few days, whipping up sparks laid down by a deluge of lightning strikes. It had all started with a dry, tightly wound thunderstorm packing far more energy in disturbed electrons than in water. The electrical storm had ignited a series of small blazes in an exceptionally dry forest filled with seventy years’ growth of unburned debris, the legacy of the newly controversial American policy of trying to prevent all forest fires. Smokey Bear, according to some, had been setting us up.