Nominations being accepted for 2018 Aerial Firefighting Award

Aerial Firefighting Award

Nominations are now being accepted for the 2018 Aerial Firefighting Award, which recognises  a significant contribution by an individual or organization to aerial firefighting.

The Award was inaugurated in honor of the late Walt Darran and is previously known as the “Walt Darran Award”. Walt was a pioneer and advocate for advances in aerial firefighting. Being a highly experienced S2-T air tanker pilot and former highly decorated US Navy aviator from California, USA, Walt was a constant and passionate advocate for safety and improvement in the international aerial firefighting.

You can complete a nomination form at www.aerial-firefighting-award.com/

The closing date for nominations is March 2, 2018. The winner will be announced March 13 at the Aerial Firefighting North America 2018 conference in Sacramento CA, USA.

Previous winners:

  • 2014: George Petterson, USA
  • 2015: Philippe Bodino, France
  • 2016: Jim Cook, USA
  • 2017: Jacques Bonneval, France

Philippe Bodino receives the 2015 Walt Darran International Aerial Firefighting Award

Walt Darran Award 2015
Left to right: Jerome Laval, CAL FIRE pilot; Richard Alder, General Manager, National Aerial Firefighting Centre (NAFC) in Australia; Philippe Bodino; Rear Admiral Terry Loughran (CB FRAes) Royal Navy, Tangent Link Chairman, and conference speaker; and Jeff Cavarra, Program Manager at DynCorp International. Photo by Frédéric Marsaly.

The 2015 Aerial Fire Fighting Europe conference took place this year in Zadar, Croatia on April 29 and 30. During the dinner event on the 29th the second Walt Darran International Aerial Firefighting Award was presented to Philippe Bodino. The Award is given annually to recognize a significant contribution by an individual or organization to aerial firefighting.

Colonel Philippe Bodino is a French firefighter who was heavily involved in ground firefighting but was also an “officier aero” (ie, Air Tactical Group Supervisor, or ATGS). He was director of the French Fire Academy (Ecole Nationale Superieur des Officiers de Sapeur-Pompiers) and led a group who wrote the manual for Sécurité Civile Fire Fighters on how to manage aerial fire fighting assets over incidents so that the aircraft could efficiently support ground troops.

The award for Mr. Bodino was presented by Richard Alder, General Manager of the National Aerial Firefighting Centre (NAFC) in Australia. Mounted on the award is a model of Tanker 93, an S-2 flown by Mr. Darran when he was based at Chico, California.

The Walt Darran International Aerial Firefighting Award is named after the late Walt Darran who was a highly experienced airtanker pilot from California, USA, a constant and passionate advocate for safety and improvement in the aerial firefighting industry. In 2014, the first award was presented to George Petterson.

Thanks and a tip of the hat go out to Frédéric Marsaly for supplying the information and the photo.

George Petterson receives Walt Darran award

George Petterson
George Petterson receives the Walt Darran award. Photo by Bill Gabbert.

Wednesday night at the Aerial Firefighting conference during a dinner at the California Aerospace Museum in Sacramento, George Petterson received an award named after Walt Darran, a legend in aerial firefighting, who passed away November 15, 2013.

Mr. Petterson was instrumental in determining the cause of two fatal crashes of air tankers. Below is an excerpt from an article in Aviation Week and Space Technology, February 21, 2005, (which is more accurate than the information which we received and posted earlier).

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“George Petterson of the Los Angeles office of the National Transportation Safety Board investigated the 2002 inflight wing failure of a U.S. Forest Service Lockheed C-130, which led to the grounding of the firefighting fleet. Finding that metal fatigue hidden by a doubler was the cause, Petterson expedited the dissemination of this information to operators so there would be the least interruption to firefighting services. The investigation stirred his curiosity about a 1994 crash of a C-130 in which the wing also came apart during firefighting. The NTSB had attributed that accident to a fuel explosion. At considerable personal effort, Pettterson retrieved evidence from that crash in mountainous terrain, showing how a fatigue crack had grown unseen beneath a doubler in a manner similar to that experienced by the 2002 crash aircraft. Due to Petterson’s initiative, the NTSB changed the probable cause of the 1994 accident to fatigue cracking (AW&ST May 10, 2004 p. 69).”