Forest Service to Add CalFire Air Tankers to Fleet

(WASHINGTON) -- Facing a season of potentially dangerous wildfires and a dwindling number of large air tankers to help fight them, the U.S. Forest Service, on Wednesday, took steps to add four more planes to its fleet.

The additions will bring the federal fleet of large air tankers up to 13, still far below the number that critics — and the forest service itself — say are needed to fight fires adequately from above.

A series of high-profile crashes in 2002 and 2004 led to stricter safety standards that gradually eliminated dozens of older air tankers from the fleet, dropping the number of available air tankers from 44 in 2006 to only 11 this season.

That number fell to nine Sunday after two pilots were killed when their tanker crashed while dropping fire retardant in Utah. Another tanker was damaged when its landing gear failed and the crew was forced to make a belly landing in Nevada. Nobody was injured in that incident.

One of the newly-available tankers announced Wednesday will come from Canada, and another from the state of Alaska. Two more tankers will come from California’s state firefighting agency, CalFire. The forest service is also calling up five large helicopters capable of dropping 700 gallons of water or fire retardant.

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