On your list of weird starts to wildland fires, you can now add military helicopter accidents.
An aviation mishap involving an Army AH-64E Apache occurred in Grant County, Washington about 4:30 p.m. on the evening of September 29.
The helicopter was assigned to 4-6 Air Cavalry Squadron, 16th Combat Aviation Brigade during a training exercise near Beverly, and it struck powerlines over the river and had to make a hard landing.
Both pilots are okay; they were returned to the Yakima Training Center for medical evaluation. The accident caused a small fire near the Columbia River, according to KREM 2 in Spokane.
State Route 243 was closed at Milepost 18 for less than an hour as a result of the incident. Later in the evening, lines were reportedly still down in the river.
Apache after Columbia River incident — Grant County Sheriff photo
The Grant County Sheriff’s Office provided initial information. “Army helicopter made a hard landing after striking power lines over the Columbia River,” they said. “Crew is OK.”
A firefighting helicopter crashed into a dam just before midnight with four people onboard while responding to a forest fire in Turkey’s western Izmir province, officials said early Sunday. The Anadolu Agency reported that the helicopter went down with a crew of four; Turkish Agriculture and Forestry Minister Ibrahim Yumakli said the aircraft crashed into the Tahtali Dam in the Menderes district after it lost contact with the team.
Yumakli said one of the four personnel, Erkinbek İsabekov, was rescued and hospitalized while search efforts continued for the other three — Mehmet Akif Tutuk, Oleg Agayev, and Ianshanlo Lamzar.
An Associated Press report on Monday said one pilot, a national of Kyrgyzstan, swam to safety following the accident late Saturday. The bodies of three other crew — a Turk and two Kyrgyz — have been located underwater. ABC News reported that the recovery had resumed on Monday after Sunday’s unsuccessful efforts. The night vision-equipped helicopter is reported to be stuck in mud 12 meters (36 feet) below the water’s surface.
The fire was controlled on Sunday. The Hürriyet Daily News reported that it took firefighters about 20 hours to contain the fire, involving 9 planes, 20 helicopters, 54 aerial water tankers, 20 water supply vehicles, 10 dozers, 10 first-response ground crews, and a total of around 500 personnel.
Helicopters.gg reported that Agriculture and Forestry Minister İbrahim Yumaklı visited the surviving co-pilot in the hospital and said his condition is stable. Journalists questioned the safety of the dam for firefighting helicopters, noting that a similar accident occurred in 2017, resulting in the deaths of five people. Minister Yumaklı said the cause will be determined after investigation, when authorities can assess whether there is any connection between the two incidents.
An 80-year-old man was arrested for throwing stones at a helicopter that was fighting a wildfire. According to a Reuters report, the fire has been burning on the Spanish island of Tenerife for nearly a week.
The stones hit the blades of the helicopter, forcing the pilot to make an emergency landing at a nearby football pitch, the mayor’s office of the town of Guimar on the Canary Islands said in a statement.
The rock-thrower is the owner of a reservoir from which the helicopter was retrieving water to drop on the fire, police said.
“We have one less helicopter because someone threw a stone and rendered it inoperative, due to the impact on the tail rotor,” said Rosa Davila, head of Tenerife’s local government.
The Canarian Weekly published helicopter video illustrating the fires’ intensity:
Video from a helicopter pilot fighting the fire on Tenerife island
The Canary Islands government has requested the assistance of three seaplanes from mainland Spain, which were flying from Malaga to help fight the fires. Officials were concerned that this could become an emergency not seen on the island for more than 16 years, since the fires of 2007.
Local farmers have protested at the use of scarce water resources to fight the fire, but Davila said that all the water used would be replaced.
The fire, which started on August 15, has burned almost 15,000 hectares (about 37,000 acres) of woodland within the national park surrounding the Mount Teide volcano, Spain’s highest peak. Thousands of people have been evacuated from their homes.
Editor’s note: Certain members of a California IMT may recall a hostile landowner on a fire in Montana a few years ago, who went ballistic when a helicopter was dripping from his pond. … Anyone know how they might plan to replace that water they are borrowing from farmers’ ponds?
A helicopter pilot was killed July 19 while fighting a wildfire near Haig Lake in northwestern Alberta. Ryan Gould, 41, from Whitecourt, Alberta was killed when his helicopter crashed while dropping water on a fire.
courtesy Ryan Gould family
“He travelled and made an impact wherever he went,” Ryan Gould’s family said in a statement today shared by family friend Kassy Goodyer.
Peace Arch News reported that a fundraiser has been started; Gould leaves behind a wife and two sons on their Gypsy Vanner horse farm in Whitecourt. Gould is the third firefighter to die battling wildfires in Canada this year, during the worst season in Canada’s history.
Thursday morning an investigative team was en route to the crash site near Haig Lake, east of the town of Manning in the Peace River region. The site is remote and unreachable by road, according to Corporal Troy Savinkoff, and RCMP were flown in by helicopter; they arrived about an hour after the first police call.
Pilot Ryan Gould was the only person onboard when the Bell 205A went down in swampy terrain on Wednesday, Chris Krepski with the Transportation Safety Board (TSB) of Canada said. A signal from the 205’s emergency locator transmitter was received from the site at 6:15 p.m. about 80 km ENE of Peace River, Krepski said, adding that the crash occurred during bucket operations.
The BBC reported that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said he was heartbroken to hear that another Canadian had lost his life fighting wildfires. “We’ll never forget his service to his province and to our country,” said Trudeau.
The helicopter was operated by Valhalla Helicopters, which is based in West Kelowna, British Columbia.
For weeks, Alberta Wildfire officials have begged people to stay away from evacuation zones, and now the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) will charge a man who ignored those warnings and had to be rescued when he became trapped by flames. RCMP said that Friday afternoon in the Fox Creek area, a 72,830-hectare fire that’s part of the Eagle Complex trapped a man who became stranded northwest of Fox Creek. GlobalNews.ca reported that police were called at 2:45 p.m. about a man stranded, where he had attempted to use a gravel road to get around an evacuation zone checkpoint. Because of active fire in the area, police said it was not safe for first responders to go in and rescue the man — so a forestry helicopter flew in and airlifted him to safety.
On Sunday, RCMP said they are seeking to lay common nuisance charges against the man for diverting firefighting resources.
“Alberta RCMP continue to be deployed with specialized units to assist with public safety and crime reduction efforts during these fires,” said district advisory NCO Staff Sgt. Neal Fraser in a statement. The man’s name was not yet released; RCMP expected details to come later this week. On Monday, Alberta Wildfire said the fire near Fox Creek is still burning out of control but hasn’t grown toward the community in the past day.
Rain was expected late Monday. The province said firefighters are taking advantage of the quieter fire behavior to reinforce a fire guard west of Fox Creek and to build a new line along the southern edge of an excursion that crossed Highway 43 north of Fox Creek. Heavy equipment is also working on fire guards, to remove hazardous rotten trees that pose a risk to both firefighters and area residents. As of Monday, there were 164 provincial wildland firefighters and support personnel working the fire, along with a structural protection unit and the Fox Creek Fire Department.
Also helping were firefighters from Colorado and New Brunswick, and about 100 soldiers from 1 Combat Engineer Regiment out of CFB Edmonton.
There were also 17 helicopters working on the Eagle Complex, including two heavy helicopters dedicated to dropping water with buckets.
A pilot walked away with minor injuries when his helicopter made a hard landing and rolled at the Edson Airport in western Alberta Thursday evening. Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) said officers responded just after 8 p.m. to the town’s airport, located about 180 kilometres (112 miles) west of Edmonton in Yellowhead County. According to Global News Canada, police said the helicopter was helping fight fires. RCMP said forestry officials responded to the crash, in addition to emergency crews.
Alberta helicopter incident, screenshot from video clip.
An Alberta Wildfire officer said the province doesn’t own its own helicopters and instead contracts with private outfits to help as needed. It’s not yet known what company owned the helicopter that crashed.
Video sent to Global News shows the helicopter coming in to land and setting down hard, causing the aircraft to flip over. The pilot, who was alone in the aircraft, sustained only minor injuries. He was taken to hospital as a precaution, RCMP added.
The Transportation Safety Board of Canada said it has been notified of the crash in Edson.
A potential 10-year, $1 billion contract list for helicopter support services to the U.S. Forest Service was announced yesterday.
According to a post on GOVCONWIRE, the indefinite-delivery / indefinite-quantity contract covers the provision of helicopters in the Type 3 category to support national resource conservation and wildland fire management programs. A notice posted Wednesday on the SAM.gov site identifies contractors on the list in a PDF linked from that site.
Award Details
Contract Award Date: Apr 26, 2023
Contractor Awarded Address: Boise, ID USA
Base and All Options Value (Total Contract Value): $1,000,000,000.00
Additional details may be available from David P. Hershey at NIFC.
Type 3 helicopters are light rotorwing aircraft that weigh up to 7,000 lbs. and can carry up to nine passengers. These contracted aircraft will support a variety of missions such as fire monitoring and suppression, initial attack, prescribed fire and aerial ignition, short-haul, and rappelling operations. The government may also use the helicopters for law enforcement and administrative flights. The firm-fixed-price contract has a one-year base period along with nine option years.
Helitack and on-the-ground firefighters learn to keep eye contact with a helicopter pilot. So it’s unnerving to look into the cockpit of this Robinson R22 and not see a pilot’s helmet as it lifts into a hover. But this is the point – this is a video of the first test flight of an uncrewed, teleoperated helicopter focused on fire missions. And it takes just a moment to spot a focused face in the control van behind the hovering helicopter – the pilot, holding a cautious yet quite committed in-ground hover.
First teleoperated flight of Robinson helicopter with Rotor Technologies. The pilot is in the control van on the right.
On December 2, 2022, Rotor Technologies’ teleoperation tools demonstrated the first and key technical challenge of moving the pilot out of the helicopter. The first three-minute flight of “Birdy McBirdface” (named in honor of “Boaty McBoatface,” a pioneering British uncrewed submersible) demonstrated the initial flight operations with their CloudPilot system and began testing and refining the remote piloting process.
To get to this launch, company co-founders Dr. Hector Xu and Greg McMillan studied the opportunities for improving aviation with technology. Their research showed that “firefighting came across as a very urgent need,” Xu said after the first series of test flights. “It’s a growing need in terms of the climate crisis. And people don’t have the tools to fight fires.”
After a year and half of programming and prototypes, they’ve launched their CloudPilot teleoperations system that relies on low earth orbit satellites to integrate accurate, real-time location-sharing and communications between the pilot and the helicopter.
While others are developing larger payload aircraft with autonomous piloting, Rotor is focused on light helicopters with real-time but remote piloting. By removing the pilot from the light helicopter, the payload increases from 170 pounds to 400, with a three-hour flight time. Even with that gain, Xu acknowledges that “in suppression operations, we will always be a little payload limited when compared with the competition.”
The advantages of a remote pilot become more apparent in precise and interactive operations, both high risk and more routine, “when flying low and slow in the deadman’s curve, such as ignitions, and providing logistics, food, water, tools. The case that is exciting is working on the fringes of the day. To build technology that is able to fly beyond visual flight restrictions, that improves situational awareness of remote pilots beyond the physical cockpit. The technology we’re building will improve situational awareness in low-visibility situations,” both to avoid inadvertent entry into instrument meteorology conditions (IMC) and to ensure safe flying in IMC. With CloudPilot technologies, even night operations become possible – think of the potential of aerial night ignitions.
Yet what adds the most value to a light helicopter with remote piloting? As Xu notes, “People have been building uncrewed rotorcraft for awhile … trying to build fully autonomous systems. We’re very clear this is teleoperations. A pilot is operating this remotely. Not a lot of people are building this technology, particularly in the civilian operations.”
And it is this clear relationship – between pilot and helicopter, and with fire operations on the ground and in the air – that Xu holds is unique in their approach, which will help build trust in new technologies that will in turn support safer mission operations overall.
Beyond wildland firefighting, use scenarios include disaster response, emergency management and eventually passenger certification.
With their success in the first flights, Rotor Technologies is planning for simulated firefighting scenarios in field tests this summer for their two prototype helicopters.
N388RA Boeing CH-47D preparing to take off at Penticton Airport in British Columbia July 16, 2022. Image from VMC Aviation Videos.
The US Forest Service has released a brief initial report about the July 21 crash of the Boeing CH-47D helicopter in the Salmon River while working on the Moose Fire 20 air miles northwest of Salmon, Idaho. The two pilots were killed.
Below is the complete text of the narrative section of the document which was dated July 22, 2022, but was not posted on the Wildland Fire Lessons Learned site until today around noon.
On Thursday, July 20, a call when needed CH-47D Series Chinook Helicopter crashed into the Salmon River, adjacent to the Indianola Work Center approximately 11 miles west of North Fork, Idaho on the Moose Fire. The aircraft sustained severe damage, the pilots were extracted and transported to hospitals but both sustained fatal injuries. The NTSB has been notified and will be conducting an accident investigation. The USDA Forest Service has assigned a learning review team.
The pilots, the only personnel on board, were Thomas Hayes, 41, of Post Falls, Idaho, and Jared Bird, 36, of Anchorage, Alaska.
The helicopter was operated by Anchorage-based ROTAK Helicopter Services.
The FAA confirms that the registration number of the helicopter is N388RA, which is one of two CH-47D ships ROTAK recently purchased from Columbia Helicopters.
The general area where the CH-47D crashed July 21, 2022. Google Earth. The red shading represents an area burned in the Moose Fire.
There are unconfirmed reports that a hotshot crew was nearby when it crashed and they went into the Salmon River and extricated the pilots in an attempt to save them.
The last time Flight Aware tracked N388FA was at 3:02 p.m. MDT July 21. Because of the rugged terrain, it first showed it north of the Salmon Airport. Then it went northwest generally toward the Moose Fire and lost tracking at 3:12 p.m., minutes before it reached the river.
As an example of the terrain here is a photo of the Comet Fire I took a few years ago from Highway 93 just east of the current Moose Fire, 13 air miles north of Salmon, ID. The Salmon River is in the foreground.
Comet Fire, July 28, 2016. Photo by Bill Gabbert.
The video below was shot at Penticton Airport in British Columbia July 16, 2022 when it stopped for fuel en route from Alaska to Idaho.
The four first responders that died Saturday July 16 when a Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Office helicopter crashed northeast of Albuquerque, New Mexico have been identified: Undersheriff Larry Koren, Lieutenant Fred Beers, Deputy Michael Levison, and Rescue Specialist Matthew King. They were the only personnel on board.
All worked for the Sheriff’s Department except for Mr. King who was with the Bernalillo County Fire Department.
The Sheriff’s Department said in a news release July 17 that the “Metro 2” helicopter and its crew were assisting with the East Mesa Fire, providing bucket drops and other air logistics needs to fire crews on the ground.
File photo of Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Dept. Metro 2. BCSO photo
The helicopter, a Bell UH-1H Huey, N911SZ, was destroyed.
Our sincere condolences go out to the families, friends, and co-workers of these men.
An aviation mishap involving an Army AH-64E Apache occurred in Grant County, Washington about 4:30 p.m. on the evening of September 29.
According to a post on 
