CalFire IA Victor

[brendan3]

Has anyone here had any experience with monitoring the CalFire IA Victor frequencies? What’s the purpose of it and what kind of coordination occurs? Thanks.

 

[NorCalrescue]

Coordination between Air Attack/Aerial Supervision Module (ASM) and Tankers and Helos. Ensures separation and coordination of aircraft over a fire.

 

[es93546]

Coordination between Air Attack/Aerial Supervision Module (ASM) and Tankers and Helos. Ensures separation and coordination of aircraft over a fire.

Think of the VHF AM frequency as the air traffic control frequency over a fire. That frequency is not used to discuss tactics, location of drops or anything similar. The Air Tactics Group Supervisor (Air Attack) is the air traffic controller as well, as the name implies, the one coming up with a tactical plan for the use of air resources. Air Attack is also following traffic on the air to ground - command frequency. Air to ground - tactical is for communication between resources on the ground who are in the vicinity of a planned drop or a series of drops. This is individual aircraft communicating with hotshot crews, engine captains, strike team leaders about such things as the position and effectiveness of water and retardant drops.

Air Attack has a lot of their plates with a lot of radios going on at the same time, including traffic on the local unit net, where dispatch relays all sorts of traffic having to do with resource orders, tanker base logistics, shut down times and ETA's of various air resources.

If you ever get a chance and can drive to a location some distance, but within view of a fire and monitor all the various frequencies you will soon figure out how this all works. You should not place yourself near the fire with a lot of looky lous that can get in way and cause problems for the people on the incident. Ideally, you should be about 10-15 miles from the fire, at a vista point and away from neighborhoods that may have to evacuate. Being this far away allows the best views of aircraft operations. Binoculars are a must. I've done this numerous times and never caused any problems for incident. A camera, preferably a good one, which can be used with telephoto lenses can be fun to capture the aircraft flying over the fire and sometimes making retardant drops. I can't emphasize enough to be far from the fire, your ability to see all of it will certainly depend of the terrain and size of the fire. Don't park on the side of the road that accesses the fire, you will soon find yourself being the object of attention for law enforcement trying to keep traffic moving on fire access roads.

 

[norcalscan]

For initial attack, here's how each aircraft is running (these are each on unique radios and audio channels into the headset):

Air Attack

1. FM Air Tactics - primarily fixed wing tactical maneuvering, rotorwing maneuvering on smaller incidents
2. FM Air Ground - Coordinate with incident commander and/or ops on incident directives (from IC) and observations (from ATGS), also tactical drop requests from ops for retardant or water
3. FM Dispatch Net - coordination with ECC for aircraft status, diverts, logistics etc
4. FM Command Net - if different than dispatch, quieter volume for situational awareness or if AA can't raise IC on A/G.
5. AM Common 122.925 - calling/hailing freq for all fire aircraft in CA
6. AM IA Victor - coordination of all incident aircraft incoming and outgoing, fallback from FM Air Tactics to keep the chatter to tactical maneuvering traffic on FM. Also becomes the primary rotor air-to-air as an incident grows to multiple rotor. Some VLATS used to not have FM radios and so VLAT tactical maneuvering would be done here too. Rotor air-to-air becomes internal to rotor so Air Attack can focus back on fixed wing, only talking to rotor to advise if fixed wing separation is needed, ("stay at the dip until I drop this tanker..."). This frequency also becomes the TFR freq if a TFR is established in an IA period.
7. AM Base Victor - used to back channel behind ECC directly to base for logistical heads up (any official orders still sent through ECC, but if ECC is busy, this gives the people on Base a heads up. Also switches to CHP Common or other commons for non-fire aircraft chatting like media, if not on 122.925.

Tankers

1. FM Air Tactics (when unassigned to incident/transitioning, this is National Flight Following)
2. AM Common 122.925
3. AM IA Victor -> switches to Base Victor when released from fire traffic area and approaching base. Requests for fuel, reloads, logistics.

Rotor

1. FM Air Tactics (becomes lower volume if primarily fixed wing)
2. FM Air Ground (coordinates directly to DIVS or similar for tactical drop instructions)
3. AM Common 122.925
4. AM IA Victor

Changes to aircraft radios on day two of a fire if/when it goes into extended attack.

• Initial Attack freqs (FM Air Tactics, Air/Ground and IA Victor) will be released and replacements assigned until end of incident.
• A second FM Air/Ground might be assigned so one becomes Command and one becomes Tactical. Command is used between incident commander/ops leadership to Air Attack and HelCo for incident directives, logistics, observations. Tactical is used for DIVS/firefighting forces to direct tactical drops to rotor, and air attack or lead planes will jump on here to advise ground crews of retardant drops.
• AM Rotor Victor assigned for the remainder of the fire. Used for rotorwing coordination between each other.
• Other AM Victor assignments that can share the rotor victor assignment, or explicitely assigned as incident grows:
  • Briefing channel for Air Attack, Lead and HelCo platforms to coordinate discretely, as well as the "briefing" between air attack and their relief platform. If you hear Air Attack request relief air attack over the fire at 1300, set your alarm for 1245 to monitor Briefing to get a very good audio narrative of incident objectives and tactics passed between aircraft. Have maps and sat view up to reference visual landmarks, mark out new division/branch boundaries that were created in that operational period, etc.
  • TOLC is Take Off Landing Coordinator - acts as a "tower" at a helibase.
  • TFR acts as the common hailing channel for any general aviation traffic that wishes to contact Air Attack, often for media news helicopters etc.
• FM Deck is helibase logistics, can also act as TOLC if not separate.