Plane crashes prompt calls to modernize aging fire fleet
SALT LAKE CITY — Once a Cold War-era submarine attack plane, the Lockheed P2V has for years been both a mainstay of the nation’s aerial firefighting arsenal and a cause for concern.
Flying in the turbulent, unforgiving skies above raging wildfires, the planes have crashed at least seven times from either mechanical problems or pilot error, causing 16 deaths, dating to 1990 when they were slowly added to the nation’s firefighting fleet.
The latest crash in Utah that killed two pilots and a crashlanding by another one of the same planes in Nevada, both on Sunday, have renewed calls for the federal government to speed up efforts to modernize aircraft used to drop fire retardant.
“As the air tanker fleet continues to atrophy, it’s going to reduce the country’s ability to get there early, which is why so many of these fires mushroom,” Sen. Ron Wyden, DOre., chairman of the Forestry Subcommittee, said Monday.
Wyden led a push in March by a group of senators from the West to get the U.S. Forest Service to bring newer planes into service.
On Sunday, a tanker went down in western Utah as crews battled a lightning-sparked wildfire that jumped the Nevada line about 150 miles northeast of Las Vegas.
Iron County Sheriff Mark Gower said Monday it appeared a wing tip hit the ground in a rocky canyon. The pilots were identified as Todd Neal Tompkins and Ronnie Edwin Chambless, both of Boise, Idaho.
The plane, owned by Neptune Aviation Services of Missoula, Mont., was built in 1962, according to federal aviation records, but had been modified to fight fires and was among only a handful of air tankers available nationwide.
Another P2V, this one owned by Minden Air Corp. in Minden, Nev., was fighting a wildfire south of Reno on Sunday. Its crash-landing at Minden-Tahoe Airport was captured on video, with the plane dropping to its belly and sliding across the runway. No one was injured.
The government previously had relied primarily on C-130 cargo planes for firefighting efforts but started slowly adding P2Vs to the fleet in the early 1990s, then began relying much more on the planes after two C-130 crashes in 2002.
The number of large firefighting aircraft has steadily dwindled since 2004, when the Forest Service grounded 33 air tankers after a number of highprofile crashes. Two of those involved the wings falling off the aircraft as they were fighting fires.
That left 11 tankers at the start of this year to mount aerial assaults on wildfires. Among those were nine P2Vs like the one that crashed over the weekend in Utah. A DC-10 and a BAE-146 make up the rest of the fleet.
“They are aging, and we know we need to replace them,” said Tom Harbour, the U.S. Forest Service’s fire and aviation operations director. “That’s why the chief (of the Forest Service) sent Congress an air tanker strategy a couple months ago that said we needed to modernize the fleet.”