The terrifying rise of mega fires and the brave pilots who fight them

Brad Blois can vividly recall the first time he fought a wildfire from the air. He remembers the thick stench of smoke, the sound of chatter crackling through his radio, the physical vibrations of the other tankers nearby—a total sensory overload. “It was like drinking from a firehose,” he says. But he knew he’d made the right decision. It was the spring of 2014, and a fire—likely ignited by sparks flung from railroad tracks—was tearing through a forest in Alberta, Canada. Blois had never worked as an aerial firefighter before. Typically, on top of their training, new hires will fly as a copilot for their first few flights. Because Blois had significant flight experience, he started off as a captain immediately. Blois, 49, began flying professionally in 1999. He spent the early years of his career picking up whatever seasonal flying opportunities came his way. First, he worked as a minnow trapper, which entailed flying a little Piper PA-8 Super Cub float plane—a “flying aquarium”—to small lakes dotted across northern Ontario, collecting bait fish that had been caught in traps overnight. He then became a pilot for commercial seaplane operators that primarily served sport-fishing lodges and Indigenous communities in the remote north. Later, he booked gigs flying to and from the Arctic and the Antarctic. He first took up aerial firefighting a decade ago on the suggestion of his best friend, a fellow pilot named William Hilts. “It’s the most fun you can have with your clothes on,” Hilts had told him. Hilts had long dreamed of becoming a pilot. His grandfather had served in the Royal Canadian Air Force and from him Hilts had inherited a uniform and mementos. During a camping trip when Hilts was 17, he and his family drove past a forest fire in northern British Columbia, where they caught glimpses of fire-bombers gliding through the air. Blois and Hilts had first become friends after bonding over their shared love for aviation, hunting, and fishing. One time, the two men came across a strange job listing on an internet forum for pilots. A museum in Europe was looking for someone to fly a 1952 Beech 18 seaplane from Vancouver Island to Belgium. They daydreamed about taking on the assignment. It would be an adventure of a lifetime, Hilts had said. Then they moved on. When Hilts urged him to consider aerial firefighting, Blois was drawn in by the promise of a stable income and a set schedule. Back in 2013, he had applied for an opening and was assigned by the following year to a crew based in Alberta with Hilts and a few others. Blois remembers that first fire season fondly, reminiscing to me about the gradual understanding he developed around the chaotic nature of fire, the deep bonds he built with crewmates who quickly became family. Bonds like these are a lifeline in a profession as erratic and hazardous as wildland firefighting. Like most professions on the front lines of the climate crisis, aerial firefighting is defined by its uncertainty, especially as fire seasons grow longer and more extreme. Today, government agencies and industry contractors are racing to develop firefighting technology that rises to the challenge posed by worsening wildfires. Just a year into his career as an aerial firefighter, Blois made the difficult choice to put aerial firefighting on pause. With two sons to raise, he decided to spend more time on the ground.Hilts, meanwhile, stayed on the job, taking up another season of firefighting. The development of aerial firefighting dates back around a century, when forest managers at state and federal agencies looked up into the sky and wondered if airplanes—capable as they were of delivering food and supplies to firefighters in the backcountry—could be used to deliver water to treetops, as well.One U.S. Forest Service fire chief by the name of Howard Flint gave the idea a go in the early 1930s, kicking a beer keg filled with water out of an airplane as it soared over Felts Field airport in Spokane, Washington, curious about how much surface area the splash might cover. “The result was not promising,” a later report noted. In 1954, the U.S. Forest Service and the California Division of Forestry launched “Operation Firestop,” a collaborative fire-research initiative aimed at developing advanced firefighting techniques. This caught the attention of an agency employee named Joseph Ely, who worked as a fire control officer based in the Mendocino National Forest in California.Ely approached local agricultural pilots with a simple proposal: Would it be possible to hack their aircraft to carry and release water? One pilot cut a hole out of the bottom of his biplane and installed a tank with a hinged gate. To that, he attached a rope that, when pulled, unlatched the gate. He filled the tank up with water, then lit a small patch of grass on fire. Another pilot took the modified biplane into the air, yanked the rope, and put the fire out.“We were in business,” Ely wrote in an essay about the developments he oversaw, published in the Journal of Forest History. The first air tankers had minuscule capacities, carrying around 100 gallons of water each. “It didn’t amount to much,” Ely conceded. “But in it we sensed the glamour and romance of a daring new idea that was bound to work and was beginning to prove itself.”Just as aircraft underwent technological advancement, so did fire-suppression chemicals. In the early years of aerial firefighting, aviators primarily dropped water. This proved frustratingly inefficient, as some fraction of water always evaporated in the heat of the fire. Chemical adaptations quickly evolved, including foam-and-water mixtures that were more voluminous and longer-lasting. Today, those are used in conjunction with long-term fire retardants, vibrantly red-dyed chemical compounds that are used to halt the growth of fires along their perimeter.Early experimental air tankers were built out of Boeing Stearmans and Naval Aircraft Factory N3Ns, aircraft first used for military training and later repurposed for use in farming as crop dusters. Quickly, the Forest Service started to fold bigger aircraft into its fleet, such as Grumman F7F Tigercats previously used by the U.S. Navy in World War II and the Korean War.(The firefighting industry has long drawn from warfare both for its technological inspiration and metaphorical power. What were wildfires but hostile forces, forested lands but fields of battle? Today, dousing a fire with water is colloquially referred to as an “aerial attack.” As Ely wrote, “Perhaps it is not surprising that the process of dropping bombs on people during World War II should have led some to think of dropping water bombs on forest fires.”)At the turn of the 21st century, the Forest Service’s fleet of converted military planes fell under intense scrutiny following a series of fatal accidents. It was a pivotal moment, one that marked a shift away from the use of retired military aircraft in aerial firefighting and toward dedicated tankers converted from commercial planes and single-engine air tankers like the planes that Blois flies. Every pilot I spoke with stressed that aerial attacks represent only a fraction of the work it takes to put out a wildfire. In fact, the primary goal for an aerial firefighter isn’t really to put out a fire, so much as to slow its spread so ground crews can “build line,” or contain a fire along its border. “Anytime there are large fires that happen, everybody sees the air tankers dropping retardant,” says Paul Peterson, executive director of the United Aerial Firefighters Association, which formed in 2023 to advocate for safety and standardization in the booming aerial firefighting industry. “Everybody thinks that’s the biggest thing that’s out there. Well, you know, ultimately any aircraft that is in the sky is supporting firefighters on the ground.”Today, most countries maintain a civil fire aviation program of their own. In the United States, the federal Forest Service maintains a varied fleet of aircraft, including single-engine air tankers with the capacity to hold up to 800 gallons of retardant; smokejumper aircraft, which are used to drop firefighters and cargo into critical areas via parachute; larger tankers like the DC-10, which can hold up to 8,000 gallons; and, of course, humble water scoopers like the AT-802F Fire Boss. Individual states can also have fire aviation programs of their own. California, most notably, boasts the largest civil aerial firefighting fleet in the world, including airtankers, helicopters, pilots, and support staff stationed at 25 bases across the state.Globally, there are also regional fleets like “rescEU,” a permanent, pan-European disaster response service, which is funded by the European Union and includes 28 firefighting aircraft. Then there are private aviation companies, which supply the bulk of the planes and personnel used in aerial firefighting operations, usually on a contract basis with public agencies. Within this fragmented landscape, countries and regions often share equipment and personnel through reciprocal assistance agreements. “Agencies around the world have typically relied on a process called mutual aid,” says Jeff Berry, vice president of business development for Conair, an aerial firefighting company with the largest private fleet of aircraft in the world. Firefighting agencies in different parts of the globe often take advantage of each others’ offseasons to exchange equipment with one another when additional resources are needed. Operations send planes from Europe to Latin America or from North America to Australia as summer descends on the southern hemisphere, or vice versa. Agencies also move aircraft within the United States as regional fire risk changes with the seasons. But in the past decade, difficult fire conditions have pushed resource sharing to the brink. “You can easily double the amount of air tankers and helicopters that are out there and we might be close to what we need for right now,” says Peterson. “The fleet, over the last 20 years, has maybe increased by 10 to 15 percent. It has not increased at the size and scale of fires.” On May 22, 2015, the wildfire management Branch of the Alberta Government called in a forest fire on the outskirts of Cold Lake, a small city on the province’s eastern edge. The agency dispatched an initial fleet of firefighting aircraft, which arrived at the scene just after 3:30 p.m. At the top of the chain of command in a firefighting operation is an air-attack officer, who conducts an initial inspection of an affected area, leads a crew of fire bombers in, and then directs the operation from overhead. This first set of air tankers—a Rockwell Turbo Commander, two Canadair CL-215T aircraft, and a Convair CV-580—quickly assembled into a choreographed loop circling around the fire. They took turns dropping water on its perimeter, with the CL-215Ts flying out to the nearby aptly named Burnt Lake, dipping in to reload with water. Meanwhile, the Cold Lake fire began to spread quickly across the forest, its flames growing and lurching erratically. As it metastasized, the fire changed directions often and abruptly, a roaring beast to be tamed.At 4:15 p.m. another fleet of tankers joined the circuit to do just that, including the plane “Tanker 692,” with Hilts at its helm. His Air Tractor AT-802A Fire Boss was a single-engine plane typically used in agriculture, reconfigured to hold and dump up to 800 gallons of water. Hilts made his first water drop in the newly expanded circuit of planes. He made his second. Then, during his third loop, the plane ran into an invisible force. Unbeknownst to the pilots circling overhead, a fire tornado had formed nearby, brought to life by a confluence of atmospheric conditions—mainly heat and unstable air—often present in cases of extreme wildfire. Aerial footage obtained from the Alberta government later indicated that the tornado, also known as a fire whirl, had been gathering in the vicinity of the air tankers as they made their drops. But it would have been impossible to detect. Tornadoes are made visible in large part because of the debris that they draw into their orbit. The fire whirl that day hadn’t gathered enough strength yet to make itself seen. At 4:30 p.m. on that clear, crisp spring day, Hilts’s Tanker 692 flew right into it.The violence of the whirl pitched the plane’s nose down, then up, then down again. Next the plane entered a stall. Recovery from a stall requires planes to be at a certain level of altitude in order to correct their positioning and to reestablish airflow around the wings. Aerial firefighting requires planes to fly low to the ground. The laws of physics and the nature of the job clashed on that day. The fire whirl pulled Hilts and his tanker toward the ground, before spinning away through a clearing in the forest and starting another fire.Then it disappeared. Fire whirls are a relatively rare weather phenomenon. In fact, it wasn’t until the advent of smartphones that they became widely documented.“These large-scale fire tornadoes were kind of unknown back in the day,” says Jason Forthofer, a firefighter and engineer at the Missoula Fire Sciences Laboratory, a research program run by the U.S. Forest Service. He first began looking into fire whirls while investigating the 2008 Indians Fire in California. “It was almost firefighting folklore.”Forthofer studies fire behavior. Last year, he traveled to New Zealand, where he and a team of researchers attempted to generate fire whirls out in the field. The goal was to better understand how they form, and whether—if we understood them well enough—they might be something we could prepare for and protect ourselves against, like other weather events. The experiment worked. He and his colleagues became the first researchers to generate a fire whirl outside of a laboratory and are now analyzing the data.According to Forthofer, fire whirls require two main ingredients: a rotating column of air and a force, like an updraft, that elongates it. When stretched, a vortex’s diameter shrinks in size, Forthofer explains, much like how elastic materials like Play-Doh or taffy will thin when pulled apart. With a shrinking diameter, a vortex begins to spin faster and faster to conserve its own energy, and that acceleration creates dangerous whirls. (Fire whirls, tornadoes, and vortices are all used interchangeably to refer to tornadic events caused by extreme fire. Some scientists differentiate among them by size or behavior, but there’s no unanimous definition for each term.)Almost all fire whirls arise from extreme fire behavior, Forthofer explains. “If we are moving into situations where we have more frequent high-​intensity, extreme fire behavior, we should certainly see a higher frequency of these large fire tornado events,” he says. “We’re probably having more of these fire tornadoes than we did 30 or 50 years ago,” though data is sparse.Wildfires can and do occur naturally, but climate change has severely distorted natural ecosystem patterns. In general, wildfire seasons are expanding in part due to earlier springs, longer summers, and warmer temperatures. Conditions like heat and drought increase fire frequency and severity. Loss of snowpack in mountainous regions means drier soils and vegetation. These conditions together make forests more flammable, more susceptible to a spark from a downed power line, a strike of lightning, or the flick of a cigarette. “From our perspective, I think we’re seeing more violent fires, more mega fires, more of these massive areas where we have to be flying for a long time just to go around the perimeter,” says Éder Navacerrada, an aerial firefighter based in Spain and the international operations lead pilot for Dauntless Air, an aerial firefighting company with a fleet of 17 AT-802F Fire Boss airplanes. Practically speaking, this might translate into more time spent in the air, more takeoffs and landings for planes to refuel. “In the past, it was once every couple of years you get one of those big fires,” he says. “Now it’s basically every season.”Increasingly intense fires represent a challenge to the aerial firefighting industry. As fires become more complex, unpredictable, and downright dangerous, how can those tasked to fight them keep up? Immediately after the accident, the remaining air tankers working to put out the Cold Lake Fire ceased operations and returned to a nearby airport. Within a matter of minutes, emergency personnel had been dispatched to the scene of the crash to recover Hilts from the plane, which lay right-side up in a gravel mining pit. The impact of the crash had punctured the plane’s fuel tanks and sent gallons of fuel into the surrounding vegetation. As first responders worked to remove Hilts’s body from the wreckage, flames crept toward them. At one point, the fire came so close they had to briefly evacuate. Word of Hilts’s accident soon spread through the tight-knit community of firefighters.Blois was working on a mountainside in Whistler, British Columbia, thinning out trees in the forest to reduce fire risk, when he got the call with the news of Hilts’s crash. His first reaction was disbelief. Hilts was one of the most level-headed pilots Blois had ever known, and it was unimaginable that he could lose his life doing what he did best.For months, Blois’s grief was a trance that he couldn’t find his way through. His family convinced him to retire from aerial firefighting for good, and he didn’t resist. He went back to freelance flying gigs instead. There was only one way he could get past the thicket of grief that had engulfed him since his best friend’s accident: flying through it.He remembered the ad that he and Hilts had spotted about the museum looking for a pilot to ferry an old plane from Canada to Belgium. It was still open. He decided to go for it, enlisting a pilot and engineer friend named Taigh Ramey to help him do maintenance on the vintage plane and be his copilot for the journey. “I thought to myself, ‘I’m going to have to put everything else out of my mind—my family, Will’s accident, everything,’” Blois says. “And that’s what I did.”Blois and Ramey flew the plane seven hours a day for three consecutive days just to bring the aircraft from the West Coast of Canada to Labrador, near the easternmost point of North America—the voyage’s halfway point. Then they took it across the Atlantic Ocean. “Will was with me the whole time. It was the adventure that we’d talked about.”Completing the journey brought a sense of fulfillment, and felt like the closing of a chapter. It helped him draw a line in the passage of time, between mourning and acceptance. “That was sort of the turning point for me,” he says. “We never really get over it. We just become less sad.” Today, there are emerging efforts to make aerial firefighting safer in the face of heightened climate risks and worsening fire conditions, many of them aimed specifically at pilot training. After all, wildfires are dynamic, high-pressure environments to navigate. With enough practice, can the unpredictable be made predictable?On a cool fall day, I drive out to the quiet town of Abbotsford, British Columbia, to get a firsthand look at Conair’s training facilities. In 2016, the company conceived of a pioneering mission-training system, which uses immersive flight simulators to prepare pilots for complex wildfires. Today, that system is up and running.Many aerial firefighters train on the same simulators commercial airline pilots use, which enable them to practice procedural moves, such as taking off and landing, and become familiar with a variety of conditions and hazards in a safe, controlled environment. However, until recently, few simulators replicated the unique risks of wildland fire: the smoke, the turbulence, the proximity to other aircraft. Like Blois, many aerial firefighters encountered these elements for the first time during a real firefighting mission. In the past decade, a slew of technological advancements have cropped up to integrate these conditions into simulators themselves. (Hilts, who was employed by Conair at the time of the accident, had undergone both ground school and aircraft-specific type training, and had conducted a number of practice missions in the aircraft. A Conair spokesperson noted via email that the company has since updated its ground training to include a session that covers risks specific to the wildfire environment, including fire whirls, trains pilots to recognize shifting conditions in the field, and empowers them to refuse a mission when they feel the risk is too high.)Outside, the sky is gray as slate, wind whipping. Inside the training facility, it is dark and silent. Six replica plane cockpits—built to mimic some of the most widely used firefighting aircraft: a Dash 8-400, an RJ85, a C-208, a TC-690B, and two AT802s—are spread out around the room. Each cockpit, replete with dozens of blinking dials, switches, knobs, laid out against illuminated panels, looks out toward a curved screen the size of a garage door. Playing on each enormous screen is a virtual projection of verdant evergreen forest, as seen from a bird’s-eye view. Suddenly, I had left the small farming community and entered the airspace above the boreal wilderness. A Conair employee sits in the pilot seat of one of the cockpits and begins to navigate a virtual plane above a fire. Smoke smudges the horizon, blurring the boundary between trees and sky. These simulated graphics are generated in part by algorithms that account for factors like humidity, terrain, wind, fuel, and temperature. The flight-training devices can be linked together so that up to eight of the company’s 90-plus pilots can practice on a complex wildfire at the same time. While this program can’t necessarily simulate extreme behavior like fire whirls, it still helps pilots to develop their skills in chaotic environments and practice difficult maneuvers.I know I am looking at a simulation, but my body can’t fully register what my brain understands. The demo plane begins to turn. Accordingly, the simulated horizon begins to rotate quickly, becoming a nearly vertical line as the plane continues to tilt at a growing angle. I feel my most recent sip of coffee race back up my throat, and look away. Conair’s simulator is one of many recent developments in the world of wildfire training. The U.S. Forest Service is using a program called FS3D, a simulator developed by a contractor called Intellic Technologies, which also replicates wildfires based on real-life conditions. In the case of FS3D, the simulated environments are presented in virtual-reality headsets, allowing multiple firefighters to train together remotely. Providing these training environments enables novice pilots to develop a deep understanding of the wildfire environment instead of relying predominantly on their intuition in the field, explains Walter Bunt, National Aerial Supervision Program Manager for the U.S. Forest Service. And the programs allow them to quickly and safely learn new skills in a short amount of time in an environment with a safety record of 100 percent, Bunt adds. In a wildfire simulator, “nobody’s gonna get hurt.” In one effort to further minimize risk to human life, some are exploring potential ways to remove people from part of the aerial elements of wildfire management. Unmanned aerial systems, more commonly known as drones, have increasingly been enlisted by local and federal agencies to spot and monitor fires, as well as to assess the devastation left in their wake. In 2007, NASA, in collaboration with the U.S. Forest Service, deployed an MQ-1, or Predator drone, to map the Zaca Fire in Santa Barbara, California. The drone, equipped with a thermal imager, pierced through a thick veil of smoke to reveal the fire’s perimeter, which firefighters had trouble establishing. Then, in 2013, the U.S. Forest Service borrowed a drone from the California Air National Guard to help monitor the Rim Fire, which tore through the western edge of California’s Yosemite National Park. Drones have since provided multiple agencies the ability to continuously monitor a rapidly changing fire remotely. “An unmanned aircraft like the MQ-1 probably isn’t appropriate or needed on run-of-the-mill fires,” Mike Wilkins, an incident commander in the 2013 Rim Fire, shared in a Forest Service report the following year. “But on an extraordinarily large, fast-moving fire like the Rim Fire, it’s pretty handy, when you have a concern about an area, to be able to get a look at the fire and what it’s doing on a more frequent basis than one nighttime infrared flight.” While drones haven’t yet extinguished wildfires, they are seeing more action in other ways. Some agencies like the U.S. Forest Service are using drones to ignite prescribed burns, a form of risk prevention, in which agencies start controlled fires to reduce risk of wildfire.But technology can bring us only so close to understanding the mysteries of wildfire, whose most certain qualities are its consequences: property damage, risk to human life, ecosystem loss, and, eventually, renewal. There are limits to how much we can predict about the infernos of the future, which will unfold under environmental conditions that exist today only as a spectrum of weighted probabilities until time makes them known. Two years after Hilts’s accident, Blois began aerial firefighting again. He did it because he missed it. Because there was one time when his son asked him offhand why he didn’t do it anymore, and Blois didn’t have a response—not for his son, not for himself. Because he remembered why he initially took the job, how meaningful it had felt that first time, in a way that other flying assignments rarely did. “Everything I do out there is immediately beneficial to my neighbors, to my friends, and my family,” he says. In June, Blois took off for Europe, where he’s working another fire season in Greece. Affixed to his helmet is a sticker that he had custom-made in honor of Hilts. It bears the tail number of Hilts’s plane as well as the words “Jackass Forever” in cursive—a term of endearment the two shared, one Blois occasionally still hears in Hilts’s voice in his head—underneath the wings of a blue swallow. Traditionally, the bird represented luck and hope for sailors. Like the songbird, these sailors embarked on perilous journeys toward an unknown horizon; like the songbird, they hoped for a safe return.