Fighting Fires from the Air 



509 



effective method developed since sys- 

 tematic protection against forest fires 

 began in 1905. 



That year a small group of pioneer 

 foresters started to set up a system to 

 reduce the tremendous yearly losses in 

 the inaccessible and priceless forest 

 wildernesses. Transportation then was 

 by pack horses or by pack humans. 

 Trails were few. Fire fighters struggled 

 afoot across deep canyons and up 

 mountain divides 12,000 feet high. 

 They had no marked routes or de- 

 pendable maps. It was hard to detect 

 fires, and many became running con- 

 flagrations before they were sighted. 

 A fire could spread from a spark to a 

 disaster while the smokechaser back- 

 packed wearily cross country 2 or 3 

 or 5 days to begin his attack. 



The spirit of the pioneers is a glori- 

 ous challenge to men of all times, a 

 lesson in courage and sacrifice but 

 glory puts out no fires. The odds 

 against them were hopeless. The in- 

 adequacy of their system was demon- 

 strated in the great fires of 1910, which 

 pointed up the need for accessibility 

 and more speedy attack. As a result, 

 in 1911 to 1925, a network of trails 

 was built, and hundreds of pack mules 

 were used to reduce travel time to 

 fires. Even so, the 2/2 miles an hour 

 over the great distances within the 

 national forests was too slow. Too 

 many fires still got out of hand; the 

 costs and losses were still too heavy. 



Then came the automobile and 

 road era. Between 1926 and 1938, the 

 development of low-cost truck trails 

 opened many forest areas to automo- 

 bile transportation. Travel time was 

 speeded up to 15 miles an hour and 

 it became possible to put out fires that 

 otherwise might have grown into dis- 

 asters. Costs and losses were reduced 

 materially further proof that speed 

 of attack is the determining factor. 



But at a certain point road trans- 

 portation ceases to be economically 

 sound; in the remote areas rugged 

 terrain makes the cost of construction 

 prohibitive. Besides millions of acres 

 of valuable forest remain outside the 



reach of road transportation. From 

 that problem, air transport was born. 



The terrible fires of 1910 left for- 

 esters desperate and willing to try any- 

 thing that held any hope of solution. 

 Airplane patrol, searching for fires, was 

 tried in a few flights in the Lake States 

 in 1915. The results were negative. 

 Flying equipment was not dependable. 



In 1919 the Army Air Force pro- 

 vided airplanes and experienced pilots 

 for patrol work over California forests. 

 Not much came of it. The planes avail- 

 able were poorly adapted to the pound- 

 ing they got in the currents that rush 

 through the mountain country. Often 

 the downdraft was greater than the 

 climbing ability of the planes. Pilots 

 took tremendous risks; many had to 

 make forced landings amid towering 

 trees or on cliffs and rock slides. 



Experiments were continued never- 

 theless in an attempt to make the air- 

 plane a useful tool in combating forest 

 fires. By 1926 the airplane was accepted 

 as an adjunct to the lookout system of 

 the Northwest. Air patrolmen helped 

 in observing and reporting going fires 

 and obtaining information on the head 

 end of fast-running fires in remote 

 timberlands. Photographs taken from 

 high-flying planes gave some informa- 

 tion for maps, but equipment was poor, 

 and cost and risk were great. Foresters 

 were beginning to see the possibility of 

 uses other than fire observation. 



A few landing strips were built in 

 the 1930's in central locations in the 

 most remote forests, and fire fighters 

 were flown to the one nearest a fire. 

 From there they walked, and they cut 

 hours, often days, from the time re- 

 quired by the old trail-travel system. 

 Even so, the landing strips were few, 

 and the men still had to trudge long 

 distances and reach a fire fatigued and 

 only partly effective. Fires still had 

 from 4 to 36 hours to spread before 

 the attackers could reach them. 



In 1929, a bad fire season, a crew at 

 the head of a fire was cut off from all 

 ground transportation. They held a 

 key point, far up on the mountainside. 

 To maintain their stand, they required 



