A huge California Air National Guard tanker plunged into the smoke-filled Pacific Palisades Valley, the ground beneath it rising up and filling its windshield. A siren blared inside the cockpit and a recorded female voice warned, “Altitude!” Altitude! “
Security guard video taken over the pilot’s left shoulder shows the pilot actively moving the yoke to keep the massive plane in the air, releasing a drenching stream of fire retardant toward the target. There is. A bright red, undisturbed box of Chick-fil-A takeout sits next to his elbow, where Hollywood-level drama fills the rest of the frame.
It’s life for about 100 firefighters who are fighting a hot, dirty and dangerous battle to save Los Angeles from this week’s punishing blaze. It’s a grueling 24-hour job and you have to eat when you can.
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While the rest of us craned our necks toward the sky or clicked on an amazing YouTube video to watch what one Cal Fire official called the most intense and complex airborne shooting in U.S. history, the pilots Interviews with have provided a vivid picture of the struggle to maintain its upkeep. Control of the ship in extremely dangerous situations.
We circle around the burning hillside, watching as people on the ground arm themselves with garden hoses as flames “blow away” homes.
“There are no words to describe the horror,” said Joel Smith, a helicopter pilot with the Los Angeles Fire Department.
Since the fire broke out on January 7, these pilots have been working four-hour shifts flying more than 50 aircraft from across the state and across the country.
This is not California’s largest fire to date, in terms of area or lives lost. But it’s off the charts because of the sheer complexity, said Paul Karpas, director of the Cal Fire and Air Operations Branch.
“This is the first time in the history of Cal Fire that we have operated 24 hours a day,” Karpas said.
They knew from day one that this would be the fight of their lives.
A Los Angeles Fire Department helicopter takes off from the agency’s Air Operations Station at Van Nuys Airport.
(Christina House/Los Angeles Times)
LAFD Chief Pilot Dan Child was just hours into his first day on duty when he noticed conditions rapidly deteriorating. Fierce winds (gusting close to 90 mph in places) swirled overhead and fought him for control of the ship as he directed traffic for other pilots trying to navigate the raging canyon below. .
“I knew if I didn’t stop, I was going to damage the aircraft or have an accident,” said Child, who has led aerial firefights for LAFD for 15 years. So he made the difficult decision to cancel the mission until the situation calmed down.
“It’s not an easy decision…I feel like I was punched in the gut,” Child said. “But before an accident happens and someone throws this thing down the mountainside, let’s get them back on track and calm the wind.”
However, the next morning, January 8, the sky above the fire remained chaotic and dangerous.
“We were still getting hit,” Child said. “It was really bad.”
Brandon Rudy, LAFD’s deputy commander of air operations, said he was in a helicopter that morning assessing Child’s situation and it was clear the situation had not eased up yet.
“You can hear the engine roar, but you can also hear the pitch and noise of the engine change, as well as slowing down,” Rudy recalled. “Basically, it was a terrible fear for both of us.”
Chinook helicopter drops water on Brentwood’s Palisades Fire.
(Myung Jae-chun/Los Angeles Times)
Later that week, as the winds died down, nearly anything with wings or rotors that could save the besieged city began to fill the skies above Los Angeles. Reinforcements came from the Air National Guard, Cal Fire, Ventura County, Orange County, and private contractors from around the country.
Military designed to precisely drop life-saving columns of water onto burning buildings from a giant DC-10 airliner modified to paint entire hillsides with bright red flame retardant. From helicopters to small observation planes circling overhead. Directing a complex mechanical ballet.
Carpass said there have never been wildfires before that have involved so many planes, especially some large rural fires in the northern part of the state, but in such a congested urban airspace. It’s his first time.
In nature, when wildfires are burning where they should be, it’s amazing how workers set a pattern and maintain a safe distance from each other as they circle from the surface of the water toward the flames and back again. It’s simple.
Los Angeles is a completely different story. Because firefighters cannot occupy the entire sky.
They had to work with the Federal Aviation Administration to set up restricted airspace for firefighters, while ensuring safe access to and from Los Angeles International Airport, Burbank Airport, Van Nuys Airport, and Santa Monica Airport. This left room for more civilian aircraft than could be accommodated.
“We can’t just come in and say, ‘This is our airspace, this is our airspace,’ and everyone else can get out,” Karpass said. “That’s not even an option.”
Helicopters poured tons of water onto burning buildings in Altadena after strong winds stopped the air from falling for several hours.
(Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times)
Another complication associated with firefighting in urban landscapes is the risk of accidental falls. Karpas said that when flying over large cities, he typically doesn’t want to use a helicopter with a giant bucket of water hanging from it. The possibility of one of those loads being released while the helicopter was flying over Highways 405 or 101 is “always in our mind,” Karpas said.
However, winter is typically an off-season for aviation firefighters, as crews perform the extensive maintenance necessary to keep these machines safely in the air. So when California officials approached private companies to rent aircraft to fight the fires, helicopters with built-in tanks were often unavailable, leaving them with no choice but to use what was available.
All of these aircraft and their crews are working in some of the harshest and most dangerous conditions they have ever faced.
First of all, there’s the wind. Most helicopters cannot fly in sustained winds exceeding 35 to 40 miles per hour. And even if you can take off, unpredictable wind gusts and lulls brought on by Santa Ana weather conditions can make the flight extremely dangerous.
Ships carry thousands of pounds of fuel and water, which puts an incredible strain on them. “When you’re in an aircraft, you’re always at your best,” said Cal Fire Air Attack Officer John Zuniga. “Max Power, everything is Max.”
So if something goes wrong, you can’t just press the gas and get out of the situation.
And they fly dangerously close to the ground, sometimes no more than 100 feet high. “The margin for error is minimal. If you get pushed by a sudden gust of wind, it’s very dangerous,” Zuniga said.
Then there’s the question of whether you can hit it where you want it and whether that makes a difference.
The idea is to drop a solid cylindrical column of water onto the flames from a helicopter. Kyle Runstead, who works as an airborne controller for the Cal Fire Department, said he doesn’t want something compact enough to “just dig a trench in the ground,” but he wants something sturdy with a certain amount of power. .
When wind speeds exceed 30 mph, anything that falls becomes fog that can be carried anywhere by the wind, doing little to thwart the flames, Kyle said.
Another problem plaguing gunfights are drones, often flown by would-be influencers looking to capture footage for their social media feeds. A collision with a firefighting aircraft could easily turn into a catastrophe.
“The other day, I think there were about 40 drone incursions in 24 hours,” Zuniga said. That means crews have to stop fighting the fire and wait until they are sure the drone is out of the way.
“Black Hawk” [helicopter] It was designed to be shot in combat,” Zuniga said Tuesday at the Santa Monica Airport, leaning on his gun. But if the drone crashes in the right place, i.e. gets sucked into the engine or hits the tail rotor, the aircraft could crash and the pilot could easily die.
Flying so close to the ground, pilots have little time to react, so even relatively minor damage can be fatal.
One of the two Canadian-made Super Scoopers, which many have seen gliding along the ocean next to the Palisades to take in water, was hit last week by a drone that crashed into its wing and caused a fist bump. He left the battle after creating a large hole. At the cutting edge.
There’s also the complexity of night flying, which is a relatively new innovation for firefighters. Pilots rely on night vision goggles and, as they did during much of the Palisades and Eaton fires, the light of a full moon.
You can’t actually see things like power lines yet, but they are a big danger. But you can see lights shining from the metal towers supporting the power lines. “You can tell which direction they are running by the way the towers form,” Zuniga said.
The ability to fly at night was critical Friday when the Palisades Fire, which had been heading out to sea, suddenly changed direction and headed north.
Giant jets loaded with large amounts of flame retardant can only fly during the day, so a squadron of eight helicopters worked long, painful hours Friday night as the fire ravaged Mandeville Canyon and threatened Encino and Brentwood. said Karpas. A desperate effort was made to hold the fort until the cavalry arrived at dawn.
It worked. The fire has grown to about 1,000 acres and may have damaged or destroyed some homes, but helicopters prevented the flames from spreading significantly into the city again. By Saturday evening, many people in the area breathed a collective sigh of relief.
For pilots, even with increased resistance to fires, there is no immediate end in sight. Their duty hours are relatively short, with four hours in the air followed by eight hours on the ground attempting to recover, but the winds are still unpredictable and the flight incredibly intense.
That’s a big deal, but it’s also exactly what they signed up for.
“We’ve been training for something like this for years,” Smith said. “That’s our mission: to be in the right place at the right time and help save someone’s life and home.”
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