Coulson Reveals How Black Saturday Changed Everything

We grew to be a sizable company over the next couple of decades, and most recently, in 2016, we sold off our woodlands and our lumber manufacturing facilities. We decided to focus on our aviation business, which we have a passion for. And although we’ve been fighting fires for 35 years, in 2007, we got into the fixed-wing role with the Martin Mars air tanker. 

Then, in 2013, we bought a C-130 and got into the next-gen air tanker business with the US government. And we’ve evolved and rolled that company into what we do now – 365 days a year, 24/7 fire-fighting. We’re still a family-owned business, and our two boys are now our chief operating officers. We currently operate 22 aircraft in the US, and come the winter months, from about November, we start heading down to Australia and then to Chile. 

Talk us through the importance of 2009’s Black Saturday bushfire? 

Black Saturday in 2009 changed our outlook on fire. And it took us in a different direction. Most people in Australia remember that horrific day. We were home, talking to the pilots for 48 hours before that happened because it was so intense. It was predicted that Australia would have this bad day, but we didn’t know how terrible it would be. We talked to the crews through the fuel stops during the day. And once it was hitting dusk, the tragedy was still going on. We didn’t sleep for a week – it just changed our lives. 

We came home from the end of that season and thought, “We’re going to do things differently. We’re going to fly 24 hours a day. We are going to figure it out one way or another.” And that took us on a multi-year trial of using night vision goggles on little helicopters, big helicopters and working on a program that let us go out and prove it. 

We couldn’t get our government in Canada interested in it, so it took the Australian government to step in and say, “We’ll give you guys a go.” CASA was excellent. Although it was two years of pushing that rope uphill, we were able to plan a path forward that convinced CASA we weren’t going to hurt anybody or ourselves. So, that’s what changed. 

What is the advantage of fighting fires at night, other than having more time? 

A lot of it was common sense. When the sun goes down, you have no heat. The relative humidity climbs as you get into the darkness and lose the heat. When you have less heat and more humidity, the impact of a drop will be better than it is during the day. The idea’s premise was also that when we fight fires during the day, a 911 phone call leads to a fire truck or aircraft being dispatched, so it’s very reactive. 

However, at night – because of the danger of flying and some of the hazards – we have to be more proactive. We use what we call an overwatch helicopter. The overwatch helicopter is the mind and management of the firebombing helicopter. It goes up first and pre-determines where you’re going to suck water and where you’re going to drop the load. 

The firebombing aircraft is just running back and forth, but now it has someone watching above it. The overwatch helicopter fires a laser beam the size of a car to identify hazards, which the pilot of the firebombing aircraft can see with nightvision goggles. We can also use the laser to identify where we’re going to pick up water and where we’re going to drop the load. So that’s how we communicate, and it’s worked extremely well. Now we can launch out of Sydney or Melbourne, and in 2019 we took that same program to Orange County. Today, we protect 17 million people, running 24/7.

We’re seeing extreme weather events in Australia. Is this a global warming issue, or is this a cyclical issue with the earth?

I don’t think anyone knows, but the seasons are just all over the place. Today, the relative humidity that I talked about at night is rising significantly, which means you’re not getting the recovery in the forests you used to get 20 years ago. That’s also a driver for these mega-fires. The fires are growing as much during the night as they are during the day.

A royal commission highlighted how overlapping bushfire seasons meant countries were increasingly unwilling to share aircraft and recommended we purchase more of our own to compensate. What’s your view on that?

We’ve been in that pinch for two seasons. We were going to start a contract in Australia but then there was a fire outburst in the United States in California. And the governments kept our aircraft and delayed us coming over. That’s a real problem and there’s no question about that.

Plus, if you look at the Australian fire seasons now, it can start up in Queensland, in August, but not end until it reaches Victoria or NSW in March and April. I think we’ve heard that the federal government is considering that national fleet of aircraft. In fact, we have one of our Boeing 737s up there, and the federal government’s looking into 270-day contracts, to keep these large air tankers in the country for longer. You need longer-term contracts because these $15- $20 million aircraft are very specialised, and you can’t do anything else with them except fight fires. You need to look for alternative markets for them unless the country is going to keep them.

Do we need to see national governments do more to help people like you develop these innovative solutions if we’re going to see worse bushfire seasons?

I don’t think the government should fund creativity. The operators are the ones that should put up or shut up and fund research and development. We thought, well, we’re going to reinvest because if we’re wrong, why should the government be saddled with multimillion dollars of training and R&D that we’ve invested? And that’s what drives good business. And that’s what drives good competitors. We have lots of great competitors out there but nobody’s yet taken us on in this field. We would like them to, of course, because that will be good for our customers.

Bushfires in and of themselves aren’t necessarily a bad thing. In fact, it’s how forests regenerate themselves. So, how do we decide which ones we put out, and which ones we leave?

One of the cool things that I think we’re going to see is the use of more fire prediction models, and we’re already working with the University of San Diego in the LA basin on that now. So, our overwatch helicopters have a mapping system on them and when we get to an incident, it will map the fire before the firebombing aircraft arrives. We can then email a copy of that data to the university and they will use their 400 weather stations to forecast what the fire is going to do. And then it can email back to us with the prediction for every 30 minutes for three hours, telling us where it’s going to grow. It means we can know how many drops it’ll take to knock the fire down. That’s another ball being moved down the field that I think will be what will help these incident command teams better understand where the fire’s going, what it’s going to do, what the fuel on the ground is going to do, how the weather will affect it. We’re just going to get smarter and smarter about these fires.