The 2014 Quadrennial Fire Review was released this month. The QFR is a strategic assessment process conducted every four years to evaluate current wildland fire management community strategies and capabilities against best estimates of the future environment. This report is the third iteration of the QFR, which began in 2005. It is not a formal policy or decision document, but rather a strategic evaluation of the long-range direction of wildland fire management.

It was written by a contractor, Booz Allen Hamilton, and occasionally you’ll see, if you’re bored and choose to read all 79 pages, that the contractor was not intimately familiar with some fire management practices in the federal government.

You can download the 4.5 MB document, but if you are mostly interested in fire aviation, we pasted below the passages covering the subject.

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OPERATIONAL CAPABILITIES ASSESSMENT, Page 39
A key finding of the QFR is that the wildland fire management community’s ability to compare and articulate the relative value of each individual capability within its overall portfolio or describe the cost-benefit proposition for maintaining those capabilities is limited. Limitations in the ability to compare and articulate the relative value is due in part to the lack of data and well-substantiated key performance indicators (KPIs) for programs such as fuels management, fire support facilities, the fire workforce, and the community’s various forms of fire suppression capability. For example, the lack of KPIs for measuring the marginal benefit of fire program capabilities and investments is demonstrated by the lack of consistency between the FS and the DOI in measuring the effectiveness of different kinds of aviation assets.

This review examined progress toward several of the 2009 QFR’s aviation-related recommendations (see Appendix A) and found progress to be limited. Progress-limiting factors include a need for a more rigorous understanding of aircraft effectiveness and its relationship to fleet mix planning. The need for a better understanding of aircraft effectiveness and desired fleet mix is underscored by disagreement between the DOI and the FS on the appropriate types and mix of aircraft for wildland fire suppression and whether aviation capability is best obtained through a wholly owned or contracted fleet. In response to identified gaps in aviation capability and to significantly reduce safety hazards, the FS has embarked on a long-range initiative to acquire a significant number of air tankers and supporting aircraft. Consistent with the performance goals described in the USDA Forest Service Aviation Strategic Plan 2014–2018, the FS is preparing to acquire seven C-130Hs and as many as 15 C-23s and is considering acquiring C-130Js. While the FS expects a wholly owned fleet to improve operator safety and address the need for a more robust and reliable core capability, there is a lack of consensus within the community that this is the optimal approach.

Differences of opinion exist across the community in part because neither the DOI nor the FS has a common set of metrics for evaluating the effectiveness of existing or planned aircraft in performing various operations—from monitoring to suppression—that are needed to demonstrate the costs and benefits of any given fleet mix.

But the need to develop data requirements, protocols, and KPIs to establish a common set of performance metrics is not limited to aviation and also includes, for example, fuels management, facilities, and workforce. During this review, both agencies noted that the wildland fire management community lacks a shared set of effectiveness measures for a variety of capabilities, which limits the ability of the agencies to engage in joint strategic and investment planning to ensure compatible and complementary approaches to the development of tactical capabilities and to provide for course correction when necessary. It is worth noting that the previously mentioned WFIPS, when launched, is expected to provide a robust planning capability for assessing operational requirements and the allocation of resources. Nonetheless, the WFIPS is not expected to be a substitute for a comprehensive operational capabilities assessment, including cost-benefit analyses of the relative value of various operational capabilities.

(Still part of the OPERATIONAL CAPABILITIES ASSESSMENT, Page 41)
Another specific area identified for exploration in this review is unmanned aerial systems (UASs). There is considerable and lively divergence within the FS and the DOI about the utility of UASs, the desirability of integrating them within its asset mix, and the prospect of UASs replacing manned aircraft. Some senior leaders interviewed for this report expressed skepticism about the cost and utility of UASs, asserting that any aviation function that can be accomplished with UASs can be accomplished more economically with the traditional aircraft already in use.

To the contrary, emerging evidence indicates that over the next 5 to 10 years, UASs may provide greater operational capacity and flexibility and reduce risk to personnel, at lower cost than traditional manned aircraft. One key role envisioned for UASs is to support persistent nighttime monitoring of fires, or even suppression operations, a capability that is currently lacking. Such a capability would empower fire planners with data to inform allocation of ground-based firefighting resources to attack fires in ideal conditions in the early morning, rather than having to wait until manned aviation resources arrive in the daylight hours. A November 2014 test at the New York State UAS test site explored the use of an optionally manned K-Max helicopter to conduct precise water and retardant drops. Such a capability, once operational, could potentially triple the amount of active aerial firefighting time over traditional methods and enable aerial suppression in ideal conditions (i.e., at night) or at times when other resources are grounded (i.e., periods of limited visibility resulting from weather or smoke).

Another high-potential application for UASs is their use singly or in groups as an integrated mobile system charged with collecting, analyzing, and transmitting data on fire conditions to personnel in hazardous situations. Such a system could consist of multiple types and sizes of UASs, deployed together to support IMTs by:

• Collecting current data on fire conditions (e.g., wind speed, wind direction)
• Transmitting fire condition data to national fire modeling systems that integrate a wide array of available inputs for real-time processing
• Distributing actionable information to firefighters via mobile devices
• Enabling real-time communications relay between disparate fire resources.

Wildland fire aviation personnel note a strong relationship with the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) unmanned aircraft office as a key enabler of progress toward the use of small, runway-independent UASs to collect data within temporary flight restricted (TFR) areas around fires. Nonetheless, obstacles remain in terms of the use of larger UASs (or optionally manned aircraft) to support suppression operations. These obstacles include FAA policy, which curtails the use of larger UASs that must transit to TFRs from distant runways, cultural barriers in a community that has relied on manned aircraft—and the pilots that fly them—for decades, and potential data bandwidth challenges resulting from the simultaneous use of many UASs. Despite these challenges, when combined with advanced sensors, data analytics, and mobile applications, UASs can offer a broad array of potential benefits over the next 10 to 20 years.

Fire Workforce and Technology, Page 49

With budgets stretched, the FS and the DOI can no longer afford to operate large air tankers, and these agencies have largely moved away from aviation because of funding limitations. With the exception of tankers contracted by the few states that can afford them, the Air National Guard provides the majority of large air tanker support across the country. These aircraft are only available for deployment on fires that pose great risk to lives and critical infrastructure.

(Note from Bill: nothing in the above paragraph is correct, except for the “budgets stretched” part, and that there have been reductions in the numbers of large air tankers and helicopters on exclusive use contracts. Booz Allen Hamilton got this very wrong. There are about 60 Type 1 and Type 2 helicopters on contract, and after the Next Generation Version 2.0 large air tanker contracts are awarded, possibly later this year, there will likely be between 20 and 30 large air tankers on exclusive use contract, but still less than the 44 we had in 2002. The  Air National Guard and Air Force reserve can activate up to eight Modular Airborne FireFighting Systems [MAFFS] C-130 air tankers if the existing contracted fleet is stressed or committed on initial attack or going fires. In an average year four to six will be activated for several weeks. In some years they are used very little or not at all. Rarely are all eight mobilized at the same time. There is an ongoing debate about how many aviation resources are needed vs. how many are on contract, but the statement below that “the Air National Guard provides the majority of large air tanker support across the country” is not accurate.)

Update Dec. 18, 2021: An article on Wildfire Today has links to all three Quadrennial Fire Reviews, in 2005, 2009, and 2014.