T-409, piloted by the editor of AF&F, participates
in a training exercise near Safford, Arizona.
Training for the future
by Marc Mullis
As the Single Engine Air Tanker (SEAT) program has grown and matured over the last several years, it has become more and more difficult to find qualified pilots to fill the cockpits of the growing fleet of aircraft. Not too many years ago, a pilot that was familiar with the aircraft could go out and drop a few loads of water, get carded and be headed to a fire all in one day. It is not that simple anymore. The airspace and the procedures have become more and more complex in the aviation fire environment. The need for in depth aircrew training has become very evident. Most of today’s Level 1 pilots learned on the job and, with recurrent training, are able to retain a high level of proficiency. Nowadays, entry-level pilots are expected to have a much higher level of expertise than were expected just a few years ago.
George Mitchell, Jr., the owner/ president of M&M Air Service, recognized this need as the 2006 fire season was approaching. He was going to be increasing the number of aircraft in M&M’s firefighting fleet, meaning he had to hire at least two new pilots. Since experienced fire-fighting pilots were so hard to find, George decided to hire two high-time ag-pilots and bring them up to speed with specialized training.
In mid-March of this year, I received a call from George. He asked if I could develop a curriculum for the training and, as an Office of Aircraft Services designated fire instructor pilot, travel to Arizona to administer the program to the two new hires. Time was of the essence, because it would take about two weeks of training per student and fire season would soon be upon us. I agreed to undertake the task and immediately began working on a curriculum.
The next morning I threw my bags in my car and headed for Arizona. When I received the call from George, I was just outside Memphis, Tennessee. I had many miles ahead of me to think about what the next few weeks would hold. The training was going to be done at Stanfield, Arizona at a private airport where M&M maintains an office. It had plenty of room and the nearby mountains provided a realistic training environment. Stanfield is about an hour drive south of Phoenix, so air travel for the students was no problem. The location seemed to be perfect.
I arrived in Stanfield a couple of days before the students, giving me time to tweak the course outline and check out the equipment we would be using. George and I had decided on a fifty-hour course, twenty-five hours in the classroom and twenty-five hours in the aircraft. This sounded like a lot of time, but we wanted to make sure that we covered every aspect of aerial firefighting and that our graduates were ready to enter a complex fire environment. The primary aircraft to be used was an Air Tractor AT-502A. It’s a real hotrod with PT6A-45 cranking out over one thousand horsepower at the pointy end. We also planned for the students to get some time in a company AT-802.
My students were Richard Holiman and Jim Self, both Arkansas boys, whom I knew through my years of activity in the Arkansas Aerial Applicators Association. Both were accomplished ag-pilots having spent many seasons over the rice and cotton fields of the Arkansas Delta. I was not worried about their piloting skills, just the fact that the professional ag-pilot mentality would have to be undone and the professional fire pilot mentality instilled.
The days were split with the mornings in the classroom and the afternoons in the aircraft. As opposed to ag-flying, most fires are aerially fought in the heat of the afternoon when the heat, wind and instability are at their greatest. There were no flights at dawn or dusk as is the norm in the ag world. I wanted these guys’ experience to be as close to the real thing as we could make it.
Topics covered in the classroom included many they had heard in the SEAT School, which they had already attended in Boise, Idaho. Here, we had more time to thoroughly discuss the subjects and the ability to use a more hands-on approach. We were applying what they had already learned.
A lot of topics that were not covered in Boise were dissected here in Stanfield. Classroom subjects included government contracts and paperwork. Both Call-When-Needed and Exclusive-Use-Contracts are pretty hefty documents. We went over every page of them. If paperwork is not completed properly, the contractor, and therefore the pilot, is not paid. It is the pilot’s responsibility to make sure the documents are correct before they are submitted. When I made this statement, the guys really paid attention.
We discussed fire behavior in depth as well as fire size-up and description. Terms and acronyms that sounded like a foreign language to Richard and Jim a few weeks ago were now a part of their daily vocabulary. Tactics on how to attack a fire, proper communications, airspace around a fire, mountain flying techniques and tanker base operations and etiquette were some of the subjects that we covered in the classroom. With just us three in the room, a lot of dialog was exchanged. There were a lot of things they had heard in Boise, but were not really clear on.
Hours were spent sitting in the cockpit, going over the systems and radios. Once a fire dispatch is received, the pilot has approximately fifteen minutes to be airborne. Several times a day I handed them a dummy dispatch, timing them on how long it took to enter the latitude/longitude and program the radios for the proper communication frequencies. What started out as a thirty-minute fumbling session soon turned into about a five-minute set-up. Often mission diverts are received while in flight and it is important that the fire pilot be able to perform these functions without thinking about it. Set-up and operation of the hydraulic fire gate was also covered.
The first hour of flight time was strictly for familiarization. Touch and goes were performed until they were completely comfortable in the aircraft. The next phase of flights involved development of drop accuracy. I placed two thirty-gallon barrels out in the desert three-hundred feet apart. The pilots were expected to drop their loads of water between the two targets. They were graded on drop start, drop stop, altitude and airspeed control. About four hours of flight time was needed to attain the pinpoint accuracy required. During this phase of training, students also develop the skills needed to split a load into several drops.
After a level of accuracy was attained, we moved into learning how to make downhill approaches to the drop, while keeping the airspeed in check. The approaches started out at a shallow angle and progressively got steeper until the students could see that the airspeed couldn’t be kept at a safe level. In this drill, we used a highway that is about three-eighths of a mile from the target as a simulated ridgeline. On each successive mission, the student was asked to cross the highway at a progressively higher altitude. About four hours of flight time was spent on this drill.
The next phase of training involved making drops in extreme terrain. We started out in smaller hills and wound up in the gnarly Superstition Mountains located east of Mesa, Arizona. The students were allowed to fly as many missions as they needed to get comfortable in the mountains. During this phase, the missions included flights into some of the more congested airspace in the Phoenix area. This gave the guys a chance to hone their communications skills. The last two days were spent flying one simulated mission after another. Each simulation was made as realistic as possible, without actually having flames and smoke in the air.
Upon completion of the course, Jim and Richard were issued a company card, signed by George Mitchell, Jr., and myself, certifying that they had satisfactorily completed M&M Air Service’s company-required fire pilot training. Our signature meant we believed they were prepared to proceed through the Office of Aircraft Services pilot carding process.
As I write this, the 2006 fire season is in full swing. Jim Self is a full time relief pilot for the company and Richard Holiman is the Captain of Tanker-423, awaiting an assignment. I have total confidence that these two men are well prepared for whatever the aerial firefighting environment has to throw at them. I would be comfortable going to a fire with either of them. They have been successfully transformed from professional ag-pilots to professional fire-pilots.
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