Meet the pilot fighting Idaho’s wildfires from the air
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Brady Caskey, KIVI
BOISE (KIVI) — Aerial firefighting planes play a huge role in taming wildfires burning across the west. Bridger Aerospace has two Super Scooper planes stationed near the Boise Airport that are helping to fight fires burning near McCall.
The Super Scooper fills its two 700 gallon tanks by skimming the surface of a body of water. They work with other aircraft and firefighters on the ground to coordinate water drops on wildfires.
John Plett is one of the pilots of this Super Scooper Firefighting Plane.
“It’s the greatest office you can have, and our main role is to support the ground firefighters,” Plett says.
He works closely with crews on the ground and other aircraft to slow the momentum of wildfires.
“With water, if it’s a smaller fire, we can put it out. If it’s a real big fire, we can take a lot of heat out of it we’re definitely most effective when we catch the fires when they’re small before they spread and kind of get out of hand,” says Plett.
The Super Scooper fills up its two 700-gallon tanks by skimming the surface of a body of water like here at Lake Cascade.
“These are the the probes or the scoops would be another name for them for how we pick up water. So we fly around with them up, we touchdown on the water with them extended like this. As soon as we touchdown right around 80 miles an hour, it’s just using the the force of the water going in, it directs it up in and fills up the tanks,” he says.
He says they usually need about a mile to fill up and take off again and they sometimes see issues with people out on the water.
“A lot of people on their boats and Sea-Doos are coming out and trying to get cool pictures and videos, and I don’t blame them but it can be kind of hazardous at times, people usually ask if we ever pick up you know fish or scuba divers or anything of that nature and I tell them if we picked anything up it’d have to be able to fit in that small hole,” Plett says.
The planes often repeat the process in pairs to help keep water continuously dropping on fires.