10:26 AM MST on Friday, June 4, 2004

By Thomas Stauffer / Arizona Daily Star

Plans to raise standards for 33 grounded air tankers and get them back online for fire duty across the United States will probably come too late for Arizona's fire season, a fire official said.

"It will have a tremendous impact if they can get those planes back in the air," said Dean McAlister, fire management officer for the Coronado National Forest. "I just really don't think any kind of a certification process could happen quick enough for us here, though it may really help states like Oregon, Washington and Montana."

In the interim, the extra helicopters and single-engine airplanes the U.S. Forest Service plans to bring online to replace the grounded tankers aren't all that beneficial in the desert Southwest, where bodies of water are few and far between, McAlister said.

"They carry a small volume of water and their flight speeds are slow enough that it takes them a long time to do their turnarounds out here," he said.

Tankers like the four DC-4s owned by Gary and Meegan Garrett of Tucson's Ardco Inc. will be sorely missed, particularly in fighting major fires, said aircraft inspector Tim Amalong, president of Tucson-based Velocity Air Inc.

"I don't think a bunch of smaller aircraft will fill that void, not at all," Amalong said. "When you get a complex fire, they need to hit it as hard and as fast with the biggest things they've got."

The fire season in the Coronado usually ends the first week in July with the arrival of the monsoon, McAlister said.

Reinspecting and recertifying tankers will most likely take longer than three weeks, McAlister said.

"The process of getting things certified, it's not a proven process and it's anybody's guess how long that might take," he said. "I'm not confident that could happen in a timely enough manner here."

The Forest Service grounded the aging fleet of 33 planes last month, citing safety concerns.

Officials said Wednesday that they have worked with the Federal Aviation Administration to develop guidelines to assess the planes' airworthiness.

The Garretts, who have spent the last week in Washington at Senate hearings on the grounded tankers, say the new standards are just one more chapter in the government's shell game.

"We get the feeling that every time we meet the criteria they ask for, they go and raise the bar on us," said Meegan Garrett. "We're going to be able to meet the new standards, but we just think they're going to raise them on us again."

At a committee hearing on firefighting aircraft held Thursday, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., told members that the 33 grounded aircraft dumped 20 percent of all the retardant used to suppress last year's wildfires.

"They clearly are a critical part of our nation's firefighting arsenal, especially when used for initial attacks on emerging fires, where the use of tankers buys time for fire crews on the ground and when used to protect buildings," McCain told the hearing.

After two tanker accidents in 2002, the Forest Service contracted with Sandia National Laboratories to develop a better safety oversight plan for the 33 tankers. Sandia visited every aircraft operator and came up with recommendations, among them a requirement that each of the planes receive an in-depth inspection. The majority of these inspections were completed by Sandia and the FAA in 2003, McCain said.

"The Sandia report came out before the fire season last year and we had to meet all the recommendations before we could fly the season, and we did," Garrett said. "Now, they're going to put in even more criteria in the middle of fire season."

After reviewing Sandia's findings, the National Transportation Safety Board recommended that planes not be grounded, McCain said.

"The key recommendation in the NTSB letter was not for the agencies to cancel contracts," he said. "It was that the contracting agencies should further develop a maintenance and inspection program to ensure the safe operation of these planes."

While helicopters and single-engine planes can help firefighting efforts, they can't provide the kind of suppression that tankers do on big fires, said George Ezell, vice president of Tucson-based Southwest Helicopters Inc.

"I don't know how (single-engine aircraft) are going to react on major fires, when you've got thousands of acres of heat and you can't get a concentrated retardant down on those flames," Ezell said. "The big tankers have always played a very important role."

Many owners of air tankers have moved their planes to Australia and other countries where they're still in big demand for fighting wildfires, Ezell said.

Legislators need to get the tankers back in the air as soon as possible, said U.S. Rep. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz.

"I believe the Forest Service's plan to replace these tankers is more expensive, more dangerous, and ultimately less effective," Flake said in a news release.

Flake has begun drafting legislation that would certify tankers that met FAA requirements as of May 31, 2004.

For more news from southern Arizona, visit www.azstarnet.com or www.fox11az.com.

Copyright 2004 Arizona Daily Star