Heavy Air Tankers

[ColoradoRedlands]

Hi all,

Does anyone have a current list of the home-bases of the various heavy firefighting air tankers? Im talking about where each of the are based before they get moved around forward based for active fires.

Chris
Grand Junction, CO

 

[EMSJUNKY]

are you looking for California or colorado air tanker locations?

 

[ColoradoRedlands]

The heavy tankers contracted to the federal fire fighting agencies move all over the western US. I was just curious when hearing one in the area, or operating from here, where it normally lives when there are not deployments going on. Basically, where each one starts the season before all heck breaks loose. (But, I should say, not where they live during the winter off-season)

 

[EMSJUNKY]

its ahrd to say where the fed contract tankers are, but i know there are a couple out of stockton, ca

 

[Eng74]

In L.A. County there are tankers out of Fox Field which is just outside of Lancaster.

 

[SCPD]

Up until this year you could bring up the national airtanker contract schedule of items and find out the locations and times of individual aircraft assignments. Aviation resources in light of terrorism concerns no longer allow this availability. I would imagine it is available to agency personnel on an as needed basis using an internal password.

Up until this year I used to print the schedule out and carry a copy in my vehicles and my backpack. It enabled me to hear or see the aircraft number and figure out where it came from. That way I could have somewhat of a gauge of how active the fire situation was when in remote areas, with no availability to the national "Incident Management Situation Report." So if I saw or heard an airtanker number on a California fire and found out the tanker was currently stationed in Cedar City, Utah, I could tell that the Fresno, Porterville, and Fox Field tankers were busy somewhere else and that things must be very active.

The airtanker contract, even without the schedule, may be of interest to some so here is the link to this rather lengthy and detailed PDF document:

http://www.fs.fed.us/fire/contracting/airtankers/airtanker_contract.pdf

See page 8 for the bad news I mentioned above.