Helitack

Helicopters provide rapid transport, enabling helitack crews to quickly respond and assess a wildfire situation.

After they have completed their assignment, crew members may pack up to 120 pounds of equipment over difficult terrain to reach a pick-up point.

At this designated location, a helispot manager and usually a few helitack crewmembers will be onsite to coordinate landings and take-offs as well as the manifesting, loading and unloading of equipment and personnel.

Helispots are temporarily located as the incident grows and can be found on ridges, meadows, parking lots – in short, any clearing suitable and meeting rotor clearance and hazard (wires, trees, etc.)

[2] A helitack helicopter will launch with a crew on board, drop them in the vicinity of the fire (or "incident") where they will begin clearing a firebreak with standard hand tools, while the helicopter can then support the team with water drops, either with a Bambi bucket or airframe-mounted water tanks, or ferry in additional personnel (e.g., hotshot crews).

[6] The first water bucket was probably developed by Jim Grady of Okanagan Helicopters working with Henry Stevenson, who owned a machine shop in Nelson, British Columbia.

US federal agencies, such as the BLM and the USFS also began contracting commercial helicopter services to assist in fighting wildfires on lands they were responsible for in the early 1960s.

[6] The California Department of Forestry began experimenting with helitack as a doctrinal concept in 1960, when a crew of three firefighters was deployed on an Alouette III helicopter.

CDF Captain Jim Barthol, in an interview with the San Diego Union-Tribune, used the analogy of runners in a race to compare helitack with other handcrews.

Smaller helicopters, such as the Bell 206 JetRanger and AS350 Astar are sometimes used for precision water drops to protect specific structures, such as cabins or homes.

Larger water dropping helicopters such as the S-64 Skycrane, which can hold as much as 3,000 gallons[vague], rivaling fixed-wing airtankers, are increasingly being used.

Only some of these larger rotorcraft have provisions for carrying ground crews, therefore may not always considered "helitack" aircraft in the true sense of the word.

The then-named Manitoba Department of Natural Resources established a stand-by system for all aircraft contracted for forest fire protection missions.