Through burning hills and blinding smoke: the aerial fight to save a city
- Share via
A massive California Air National Guard tanker dives into a Pacific Palisades canyon full of smoke, as the ground below rushes up and fills the windshield. Sirens blare in the cockpit, and a recorded woman’s voice warns, “Altitude! Altitude!”
The guard video, shot over the pilot’s left shoulder, shows him aggressively working the yoke to keep the enormous plane airborne and on target to release a drenching stream of fire retardant. Next to his elbow, as Hollywood-level drama fills the rest of the frame, sits a bright red, undisturbed box of Chick-Fil-A takeout.
That’s life for the roughly 100 fire pilots fighting the hot, dirty and dangerous battle to save Los Angeles from this week’s punishing flames. It’s a gritty, around-the-clock job — you eat when you can.
- Share via
As the rest of us crane our necks skyward, or click on YouTube videos to watch what one Cal Fire official called the most intense, complicated airborne firefight in U.S. history, interviews with the pilots paint a graphic picture of the struggle to maintain control of their ships in extraordinarily treacherous conditions.
All that while circling over burning hillsides, watching people on the ground arm themselves with overmatched garden hoses as the flames “blowtorch” their homes.
“There’s no words to describe, just, the horror,” said Joel Smith, a helicopter pilot for the Los Angeles Fire Department.
Since the fires erupted Jan. 7, those pilots have been working rotating four-hour shifts to navigate more than 50 aircraft flown in from across the state and nation.
It’s not California’s biggest conflagration by acreage, or lives lost, so far. But for sheer complexity, it’s off the chart, said Cal Fire air operations branch director Paul Karpus.
“This is the first time in Cal Fire history that we’ve had 24-hour operations,” Karpus said.
They knew it would be the battle of their lives from Day One.
Dan Child, chief pilot for LAFD, was only a few hours into his shift that first day when he realized conditions were deteriorating fast. Fierce winds — gusts of nearly 90 mph in some locations — fought him for control of his ship as he circled overhead, directing traffic for other pilots attempting to navigate the turbulent canyons below.
“If we didn’t stop, we knew we were gonna either damage an aircraft or have an accident,” said Child, who has been conducting aerial firefights for the LAFD for 15 years. So, he made the agonizing decision to scrub the missions until things calmed down.
“It’s not an easy call. It feels almost like a gut punch,” Child said. “But before we have an accident and somebody puts this thing into the side of the mountain, let’s bring them back off, let the winds calm down.”
But even the next morning, on Jan. 8, the airspace over the fire remained turbulent and dangerous.
“We were still getting beat up,” Child said. “It was really bad.”
Brandon Ruedy, assistant section commander for LAFD’s air operations, was in the helicopter that morning assessing the situation with Child, and said it was clear conditions had not let up.
“You’re hearing the hum of the engines, but not only are we dropping, then I’m hearing the engine changing pitch and noise,” Ruedy recalled. “Basically, it scared the crap out of both of us.”
Later in the week, as the winds began to die down, almost anything with wings or rotor blades that could help save the beleaguered city began to fill the sky above Los Angeles. Reinforcements came from the Air National Guard, Cal Fire, Ventura County, Orange County and private contractors across the country.
They included massive DC-10 passenger airliners retrofitted to paint entire hillsides with bright red retardant at the leading edge of the flames; military helicopters designed to precision drop columns of life-saving water on burning buildings; and smaller spotter planes that circle high above and direct the intricate mechanical ballet.
There have been other wildfires that drew as many aircraft, particularly some of the enormous rural fires in the northern part of the state, Karpus said, but never in such congested urban air space.
When wildfires are burning where they’re supposed to be — in the wild — it’s relatively easy for crews to set up a pattern and keep a safe distance from one another as they circle from the water to the flames and back again.
It’s a different story in L.A., because the fire pilots can’t just take up the whole sky.
They’ve had to work with the Federal Aviation Administration to set up restricted air space for the firefighters, while still leaving room for the incredible volume of civilian planes to fly safely in and out of LAX, Burbank, Van Nuys and Santa Monica airports.
“We can’t just come in and say, ‘This is our airspace; everyone else get out,’” Karpus said. “That’s not even an option.”
Another complication that comes with fighting fires in an urban landscape is the danger of accidental drops. Typically, Karpus said, he’d rather not use helicopters dangling huge buckets of water when flying over a big city. The possibility of one of those loads releasing while the helicopter is flying over the 405 or 101 freeways is, “always, always on our minds,” Karpus said.
But winter is generally the offseason for aerial firefighters, when crews do the extensive maintenance required to keep these machines safely airborne. So when California officials reached out to private companies to rent aircraft to help fight the fires, helicopters with internal tanks were often unavailable. They had to take what they could get.
All of these aircraft and their crews are working in some of the toughest, most dangerous conditions they’ve faced.
Everyone knows California is disaster-prone. But wildfires are supposed to be in the hills, not on the beach, and certainly not inside the borders of one of the biggest and best-prepared cities on the planet. That makes the Palisades fire all the more unearthly.
First there’s the wind. Most helicopters can’t fly in sustained wind over 35 to 40 mph. And even when they can take off, the unpredictable gusts and lulls brought on by Santa Ana conditions can make flying extraordinarily risky.
The ships are loaded with thousands of pounds of fuel and water, so they are under incredible strain. “You’re at maximum performance the entire time with the aircraft,” said John Zuniga, an air attack officer for Cal Fire. “Max power, everything is maxed out.”
So, if anything goes wrong, it’s not like you can just hit the gas and get out of the situation.
And they’re flying perilously close to the ground, sometimes no higher than 100 feet. “You have minimal margin for error. If you get pushed by a sudden wind gust, it’s very dangerous,” Zuniga said.
Then there’s the question of being able to hit what you’re aiming at, and having it make any difference.
From a helicopter, the idea is to drop a solid, cylindrical column of water on the flames. You don’t want it so compact it just “digs a trench into the ground,” said Kyle Lunsted, who works as an airborne air traffic controller for Cal Fire, but you want it solid enough to have some oomph.
When the wind is howling above 30 mph, whatever you drop just turns to mist and goes wherever the wind takes it, doing very little to hamper the flames, Kyle said.
Another problem plaguing the firefight is the drones, often flown by would-be influencers trying to capture footage for their social media feeds. A collision with a firefighting aircraft could easily be catastrophic.
“The other day, I believe we had, like, 40 drone incursions in a 24-hour period,” Zuniga said. That means crews have to stop fighting the fire and wait until they’re sure the drone is out of the way.
“A Black Hawk [helicopter] was designed to be shot at in combat,” Zuniga said, leaning against one at Santa Monica Airport on Tuesday. But if a drone hits the right spot — gets sucked into the engine or hits a tail rotor — the aircraft could crash and the pilots could easily be killed.
Even relatively minor damage could prove fatal because, flying so close to the ground, the pilots would have almost no time to react.
One of two Canadian-built Super Scoopers, the planes so many people have seen skimming along the ocean next to the Palisades to suck up water, was taken out of the fight last week when a drone hit its wing, punching a fist-sized hole in the leading edge.
There’s also the complexity of flying at night, a relatively new innovation for firefighters. Pilots rely on night vision goggles and, as has been the case during much of the Palisades and Eaton fires, light from the full moon.
You still can’t actually see things like power lines — a huge danger — but you can see the light glinting off the metal towers holding them up. “We can tell which way they are running by the way the towers are formed,” Zuniga said.
The ability to fly at night was pivotal Friday, when the Palisades fire, which had been pushing toward the ocean, made a sudden about-face and headed north.
Huge jets with their massive loads of retardant can fly only in daylight, Karpus said, so for a long, agonizing stretch Friday night, as the fire chewed its way over Mandeville Canyon, threatening Encino and Brentwood, a squadron of eight helicopters worked in a desperate effort to hold the fort until the cavalry could arrive at dawn.
It worked. The fire grew by about 1,000 acres and likely damaged or destroyed some homes, but the helicopters kept the flames from making another big run into urban areas. By Saturday evening, much of the region breathed a collective sigh of relief.
A squadron of firefighting aircraft and convenient water supplies were key in saving Brentwood and Encino from the growing Palisades fire last weekend.
For the pilots, even as they gain ground against the fires, there is no quick end in sight. Their shifts are relatively short, four hours in the air followed by eight on the ground to try to recover, but the winds remain unpredictable and the flights incredibly intense.
It’s a grind, but it’s also exactly what they signed up for.
“For years and years, we train for stuff like this,” Smith said. Being in the right spot at the right time, to help save someone’s life or their house, “that’s what we’re built for.”
Sign up for Essential California
The most important California stories and recommendations in your inbox every morning.
You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.
