C-130 News: Four Air Force C-130s battling Rocky Fire in California

[casey]

The Air Force has joined the battle against the Rocky Fire north of San Francisco.

Firefighters have gone to Herculean efforts to try to stop the massive fire, but the blaze is not close to being contained. The fire scorched 62,000 acres as of Monday, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

Four Air Force C-130s equipped with the Modular Airborne Firefighting System are operating out of McClellan Airfield in Sacramento to provide the equivalent of close air support to firefighters on the ground.

Two of the C-130s are with the 302nd Airlift Wing, an Air Force Reserve unit based at Peterson Air Force Base, Colorado; and the other two C-130s come from the 146th Airlift Wing of California Air National Guard, said Maj. Andrew Miller, mission commander for the 146th Airlift Wing.

The planes flew 22 sorties on Monday, Miller told Air Force Times on Tuesday. Operations are expected to continue for at least three more weeks.

“Just talking to folks in the field: This fire is a little bit different in the fact that the wind is not as predictable as fires have been in the past,” Miller said. “From the ground perspective: Usually they can predict which way the fire is going to go, but the winds are going every which way.”

The Rocky Fire is big, both in terms of the number of blazes raging right now, and the number of agencies involved trying to knock back the flames, said Lt. Col. Robert Fairbanks, a pilot with the 302nd Airlift Wing.

“Every three or four years, we’ll see a fire season like this,” Fairbanks said. “It’s very similar to California in 2008, when had all four of our MAAFS squadrons were involved here in McClellan.”

So far, the weather has been good enough for the C-130s to operate safely in the fire zone, Fairbanks said.

“It’s warm; it’s dry, but if the conditions were to go worse, definitely we would not be able to fly in that environment, if it got too windy,” he said.

On July 1, 2012, four members of the North Carolina Air National Guard's 145th Airlift Wing were killed when their C-130 crashed after flying through a small and intense thunderstorm known as a “microburst.”

Firefighting requires the C-130s to fly very low and very slow, and that requires the pilots to be extra attentive and the entire aircrew to provide more support than on other missions, Fairbanks said.

The rugged terrain where wildfires occur makes the firefighting mission even more challenging, said Maj. Chad Lunbeck, a pilot with the 146h Airlift Wing.

“We train for this scenario and we make sure that our best and most highly qualified members are the ones who do this mission, as vetted through leadership,” he said. “Mountainous terrain is very — it’s challenging to fly through with the smoke and rising terrain or descending terrain and other airplanes in the traffic area, it all makes for a challenging situation — we don’t like to use the word ‘dangerous.'”

With so many planes waiting to attack the fires and helicopters hovering at lower altitudes, pilots have to be careful to avoid other aircraft, Lunbeck said.

“Everybody has their assigned altitude, which obviously helps, but that’s one of the biggest challenges too, besides the fact that the fire is all around and the smoke can take away your vision very quickly,” Lunbeck said.

In July, firefighting efforts in Southern California were interrupted by commercially available drones flown by hobbyists, which prevented helicopters from dropping water onto a fire that spread to a Los Angeles-area freeway, according to CNN.

So far, the airmen battling the Rocky Fire have not seen any drones, but they would have to suspend firefighting flights if any drones show up, Lubneck said.

“If we have a rogue drone flying around, we can’t risk the lives of everybody else to avoid that,” he said. “It would basically shut down firefighting operations if we were to see one flying around.”

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Image: 302nd AW

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