LA Fires: Pilot Explains How Hard It Is to Battle Flames From a Plane

• Captain RK Smithley flies McDonnell Douglas DC-10 fire bombers for New Mexico-based 10Tanker.
• Smithley dropped red fire retardant over the Palisades and Eaton fires in Los Angeles.
• Mountainous terrain, winds, busy air traffic, and drones have complicated the mission.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Captain RK Smithley, a pilot flying McDonnell Douglas DC-10 widebody airliners converted into tanker planes for a New Mexico-based company called 10Tanker. The DC-10 is one of dozens of aircraft assisting in fighting the California wildfires near Los Angeles. His words have been edited for length and clarity.

I’m a third-generation ground firefighter who ended up in the air fighting fire, so my career has come full circle.

Starting at age 16, I spent 16 years as a volunteer firefighter in southwest Pennsylvania, where I’m from, before I became a pilot. I flew for World Airways in these same McDonnell Douglas DC-10s for 10 years and another 15 years in the MD-11, which is basically a modern version of the DC-10.

We’re the biggest tanker fighting the California wildfires

To fight the California fires, 10Tanker has four DC-10s and two — ships 912 and 914 — here in San Bernardino at the old Norton Air Force Base. I’m on Ship 912. The DC-10 is a capable airframe for our size, at 420,000 pounds. We’re dropping 85,000 pounds of fire retardant on our target.

It’s a very good airplane for what we’re doing — we’re the largest tool in the Forest Service’s arsenal because we’re the biggest tanker out here.

January is an odd time for wildfires in California

This fire is unprecedented. In 10 years of doing this, I’ve never flown fire in the United States in January. Working fires in January usually means we’re in Australia, Mexico, and Chile.

We’re in the off-season. That’s why all four of our DC-10s aren’t here; the other two are in maintenance. Typically, we park our airplanes in October or November, and we’ll do recurrent annual training in February and March before the first airplanes go out on contract in mid to late March.

We’re one part of a large team

There are different contract tankers that fight fires. We’re all on the same team, from the little single-engine tanker carrying 700 hundred gallons to us big ones carrying 9,400 gallons, and all the stuff in between.

I can’t stress enough how much of an orchestrated team effort it is. We work as a team with the tanker base, with the mechanics who keep us rolling, the air traffic controllers to get us out there, the guys fueling the airplane, and all those retardant loaders. Some airplanes out here are what they call “initial attack qualified,” which means they can go out with just aerial supervision orbiting over top, but we in the DC-10 have to have lead aircraft that we follow to guide us on the drops.

But at the end of the day, the real heroes are the guys and gals we’re helping — the firefighters on the ground. They’re the ones that we’re there to support to the best of our ability so that they can help protect lives and property.

The 10Tanker flies a very specific mission

It’s not as simple as flying over the fire and pushing a button and all the stuff comes out.

Helicopters are generally dropping water to directly attack the fires, but air tankers — or fire bombers as I like to call them — are designed to carry fire retardant, which is designed to build walls around fires to stop or at least slow down the fire so that the ground firefighters can get in there and get things under control. The retardant is colored red so that we can see it build lines and change angles on it.

We start our days at 7 a.m. — basically sunrise — at which time the airplane is prepped, ready, and fueled to go. How many flights we can wedge in between 7 a.m. and 5:30 p.m. depends on how far the fire is from the base, and how much daylight you have.

We flew four missions on Friday to the Palisades and six on Saturday. The record for 10Tanker is about 11 runs in a day, with a 20-minute reload time in between flights.

LA’s weather and geography have been a challenge

These fires have been bad not only because of the destruction and the wind, but also because we’re fighting fire while wedged into tight air space between the LAX, Van Nuys, Burbank, and Santa Monica airports.

The Palisades fire is around 24,000 acres; I’ve worked 300,000 and 400,000 acre fires that were massive compared to this one. But the destruction and air space and the 60 to 80 MPH winds kind of made this a cataclysmic event. Entire neighborhoods and towns burned until the winds died down enough for us to get in there and get to work. It’s been a terrible situation.

We’re threading needles, like going straight down the side of a mountain. The DC-10 is very capable; we yank and bank it around like a fighter. If we were flying passengers, these maneuvers would be considered an emergency descent.

If drones fly, we can’t

Drones have been a big problem here in California. “If drones fly, we can’t” is an axiom we use in aerial firefighting. Normally a drone will shut down an aerial firefighting effort.

At one point, we moved to a different section of the fire to get away from them so that we could continue to help save lives and property, along with the work that firefighters on the ground are doing to get this thing under control. We had a drone come sailing past our left wing on Saturday; the Super Scooper air tanker from Montreal got a hole punched into its wing because a drone ran into it.

The drones have to stop because they’re jeopardizing our lives and safety in the fire traffic area. It’s unacceptable. Get the drones out of there so we can do our jobs.