On May 10, just as the 2004 wildfire season was beginning, federal agencies announced the immediate termination of contracts on all of its 33 large air tankers after a report from the National Transportation Safety Board revealed “fatigue fractures” were causing tanker crashes and that there was essentially “no apparent effective mechanism to ensure the continuing airworthiness of these firefighting aircraft.”

James B. Hull, the state forester and director of the Texas Forest Service in College Station, Texas, co-chaired the Blue Ribbon Panel on Aerial Firefighting that presented a public report to the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Interior in December 2002. The panel's report strongly brought into focus safety concerns for the aging fleet of large air tankers and instigated many initiatives at the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management to improve large air tanker safety.

How do you feel about the decision to cancel federal air tanker contracts?

Our Blue Ribbon Panel members have discussed among ourselves the NTSB letter that went to the secretaries of Agriculture and Interior. The fact that the NTSB report so closely paralleled our report, we felt like it was proper for us to support the decision to stand down the use of those 33 old large air tankers.

Some say that that one result of this sudden shift in air support may result in more fires that escape containment. How will this affect safety on the ground?

It's a very complex issue, but I understand things are being done by the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management [to fill the gap left by large air tankers]. They've already started the process and have been looking for some time how to replace air tankers with other platforms that will deliver retardant and water and do it as effectively and in some cases more effectively than the big air tankers.

Some of the things that they're looking at is greater use of what we call heavy-lift helicopters.… The beauty part about those large helicopters is they can go to a supply that's anywhere close, whereas the big air tankers would have to go to an airbase somewhere, load up with retardant and go drop it on the fire and then come back to the base and load again. These heavy-lift helicopters, I've heard, can make anywhere from six to 10 drops of water in the same amount of time that it took one of those air tankers [to make one drop]. Where the air tankers were dropping 2,400 gallons of water, the large helicopters carry 3,000 gallons. So if the conditions are right, the firefighters on the ground, the property they are trying to save, the public could possibly be even better off.…

I think what you'll see being done with the remaining air resources, plus the new ones that they get, is you will see a lot of concentrated effort on identifying the highest hazard areas, the prepositioning of resources and having them at the right place at the right time, very rapid initial attack and good-quality detection of fires. We'll even do better than we have been doing on finding the fires while they're small and putting them out, then going on to the next thing.…

Is the Forest Service planning to contract for something that's more designed for this purpose?

A number of private resources around the nation have already been looking into developing such a purpose-built aircraft, but they need the assurance that once built — it's very expensive to develop prototypes and develop testing and that sort of thing — they'll be used. That's been one of the problems that a lot of the contractors have had in the past. The best that these contracting federal agencies would permit was one- to three-year type contracts, and you can't invest the kind of money it takes to develop a new airplane if all you can be assured of is a short-term contract. So we need to be looking at multiyear contracts…. But I know we have the technology and we have the private enterprise that would be willing to do that.

In the meantime, are you saying to yourself, “It's about time”?

It doesn't seem like for a major decision like this that there's ever a perfect time for it, but the time had to come. I've heard it said already that this was a relatively easy decision to make, but the implementation is going to be extremely complex and extremely difficult.…

Obviously, I wish we had the immediate time and immediate funding sources and so forth to transition into the next phase and keep on going without a blink. Unfortunately we're not at that point right now, but I'm assured. We've got some quality people that are working on this, and I'm sure they'll do the best they possibly can, make the most of it and very quickly get to the best solution.