A puff of smoke floats above an otherwise uninterrupted tree canopy. It is the earliest visible indication of a fire taking hold.
But the sound growing in volume and intensity among the pine and fir trees is not the crackle and roar of burning brush — it’s the steady, rhythmic thrum of rotor blades.
As nearly 19,000 pounds (8,600 kilograms) of helicopter decelerates into a hover, the sound reaches a crescendo. Inside the aircraft, hand signals are necessary to coordinate the movement of eight firefighters plus a spotter, their protective equipment, and power tools.
A rope, only about the thickness of a Sharpie, snakes from each of the aircraft’s two side doors, down 20 stories into the canopy below. Rappelling down those ropes is the only way to get the firefighters where they need to be to stop a fire of this scale, and everything needed to support them in that mission must also be delivered by the helicopter: an Airbus Helicopters AS332L1/H215 Super Puma.
Designed to fly oil workers to offshore rigs and developed from a military design, it is now flying into a different kind of mission: the initial attack on a wildfire, aimed at ensuring the public never hears about it, let alone feels its heat.
“I often say, if you see our helicopter on the news, it’s a bad day,” said David Rath, CEO of the Precision group of companies based in McMinnville, Oregon. “We are out there in the remote areas waiting for the radio call. So most of our missions, neither the public nor social media ever learns about.”
The Precision group is more than just firefighting, though. It’s a family of companies that conducts activities ranging from charter operations to maintenance, aircraft distribution, aerospace engineering and even specialized operations such as high-end unmanned aerial systems (UAS) deployment.
“I think to be successful in the aviation industry as a whole, you need to have diversification built in somewhere,” Rath said. “For us, yes, it’s the MRO, it’s the UAS, it’s the flight operations — that’s probably our diversification. It’s those three companies that have given us the footprint, or the foundation, to build a business.”
But while Precision adopted diversification with Type 1 heavy helicopters and UAS to build resilience and create opportunities for growth, it wasn’t always the case. The company traces its roots back to 1983, when Nancy and Dennis Sturdevant operated a handful of light aircraft.
The couple built Dennis’s passion into a capable local services, maintenance, and training company. But that changed in 2008 with the U.S. housing and banking crisis. The economic downturn affected the company, and many of its customers stopped calling or walking through the door. The company knew it needed to change.
As Precision and the banking industry continued to work its way out of what became a global downturn, Dennis passed away in 2011. With significant uncertainly, Rath was brought in and the company began restructuring with just a handful of employees.
“I’m not a pilot, which definitely gives me a different perspective,” Rath explained. “It’s so capital intensive. Maintaining and flying is key, but if you don’t have the funding and the capital to make it all happen, it’s all for naught. We are now over 100 employees and we want to be the place that people retire from.”
The restructuring brought with it new types of work, new requirements, and the company’s first acquisition.
“When I came on, we had a [Bell 206] JetRanger and an [Airbus Helicopters AS350] AStar B2,” said Ty Burlingham, the chief pilot who has been with Precision since 2016. “We started getting into some fire contracting with the B2. We were doing Christmas tree harvest and fir bough [work] with the JetRanger.”
Over time, demand for aircraft to help fight wildfires grew to the point that it necessitated an increase in both the size of the company and its aircraft.
“A helicopter company in Washington [came] up for sale, and we ended up buying that,” Burlingham said. “That was our first big expansion. And then we said, ‘All right, we’re getting bigger into the fire game. Let’s go into a bigger airframe,’ so the [Bell] 205 was the clear choice.”
At the time, it felt to some in the company as though they had fulfilled their ambition. But the market had other ideas.
“We thought we really made the best decision in the world when we bought a Bell 205,” Rath said. “We’ve really made it. We’re operating Type 2s. But the Forest Service and other customers were changing their appetite, requesting bigger and more capable aircraft while laying out a road map of longer-term contracts and additional funding to modernize the fleet.”
It was this growth in demand, specifically from the Forest Service, that largely drove the next evolution in the size of Precision’s aircraft, if not immediately the size of its fleet or the scale of the company.
After a fatal helicopter crash in 2008, the Forest Service stopped carrying passengers in its Type 1 aircraft, the designation used to classify helicopters above a certain weight and load-carrying threshold. While other agencies reclassified firefighters as mission crew and used public service designation, enabling them to fly in restricted-category aircraft such as military surplus heavy-lift types, the Forest Service did not.
Instead, by the end of the 2010s, it issued a request for proposal (RFP) with extremely demanding specifications that all but ruled out restricted-category aircraft and explicitly called for aircraft manufactured after 1990, as much of the fleet supporting its missions had been built in the 1960s. While 1990 didn’t represent the latest technology, requiring aircraft no more than three decades old was expected to deliver significant improvements in capability and safety.
Rath had seen an aircraft that fit the bill before, albeit in the context of a very different kind of firefighting.
“In 2009, when I was at Evergreen Helicopters, we received a contract for Afghanistan,” Rath explained. “We searched all aircraft that were able to perform in a hot-and high-environment, and that’s where we found the AS332L1, or the H215. It could not do it well with the weight of the offshore configuration but if we could lighten it up, it would be a workhorse.”
While Rath was familiar with the Super Puma, others in the company were less familiar with the European type.
“David came to me one day and said, ‘We’re going to buy Super Pumas.’ And I said, ‘What is a Super Puma?’” Burlingham said. “I had no idea. I had to get on Google and look it up.”
What he found didn’t dampen his enthusiasm.
“If you buy it, I’ll fly it,” he said. “I’ll tell you that right now.”
While the new aircraft delivered benefits with one hand, it also presented challenges with the other.
“The advantage of [standard-category] is the oversight that goes into the management of the aircraft,” said Matt Van Pelt, director of operations at Precision LLC. “When [aviation authorities put] their stamp of approval on an aircraft, it has to go through a rigorous procedure. Military aircraft are very capable of doing what it is that they’re doing, but they do not meet the criteria that we need to be able to say that we have a [regulator] blessed aircraft that can carry passengers and do so safely under FAA Part 135 Air Carrier for Passenger Service.”
The aircraft was literally in a different category from what it replaced, but that was especially true when it was deployed to rappel firefighters on initial attack missions.
“Historically, there have been four rappelers with a spotter, and they would travel at the breakneck UH-1 speed of 100 to 105 knots,” Van Pelt said. “What we were proposing was to put nine people on board: one spotter and eight [rappelers], with all their gear, an initial attack bucket and the fuel to stay on station to help the fight.”
This was something of a revelation, even within the company.
“It was interesting to watch the medium type helicopters go out and they’re taking the four guys out and then coming back for the next four and then coming back for supplies,” said Rebecca Novak, director of safety at Precision, “Whereas we take all eight of them out and all of their supplies all in one drop.”
While the payload and performance were impressive, the aircraft’s certification status was arguably its most important characteristic.
“The standard-category piece was the major determining factor in going that direction,” Burlingham said. “We needed modern, current-production aircraft. Obviously, it comes with a price.”
That price went beyond the capital expenditure required to acquire it.
“Most of the support for Airbus is very good — very good in France, but not so much in the United States,” Rath said. “It’s improving, but it’s not where it should be, so we can’t necessarily always depend on the OEM for same day counter-to-counter shipment, at least in North America, because of stock levels and shipping times. We have to depend on ourselves.”
Training those staff presents as much of a logistical challenge as keeping them supplied with the spare parts they need to do their jobs.
“Probably one of the largest challenges is to find the right technicians to work on these aircraft,” Rath said. “Pilots are a challenge, but I feel like we can train a pilot a lot faster and easier than we can train the maintenance staff to be proficient in the aircraft.”
In this, too, Precision decided early on that it would have to be self-sufficient.
“There was a big learning curve in the beginning,” said Grayson Barrows, general manager of Precision Support Services. “But I’m very glad that we made that decision about five or six years ago to undertake our first G-check in-house for a Super Puma. Our own mechanics know what’s in that aircraft right down to the bones or to the airframe.”
That level of understanding among the technicians certainly helps keep the aircraft flying, but staying ahead of the competition and evolving customer requirements demands a different kind of engineering capability.
“Airbus only offered a single-side bracket for a hoist,” Burlingham said. “So a team engineered our own dual [rappel] brackets. We have two full-time aerospace engineers here at Precision and many contractors that support our efforts. And that was our first major STC for the aircraft.”
Rather than seeing these requirements to develop in-house capabilities as hurdles, Rath has applied both his philosophy of diversification and a commitment to innovation, turning them into revenue centers rather than simply costs to be endured.
“You go walk to the hangar, none of those aircraft are ours,” Burlingham said. “Those are all customer aircraft for the most part. And so it’s really taken off.”
“You have to listen and understand the market and start developing,” Rath explained. “How are we bringing new tools to the toolbox? How are we allowing the firefighter or any customer to do their job a little bit better? If we don’t get the firefighter on the ground, we can’t conclude that we stopped a possible disaster.”
Adopting the Super Puma for the firefighting role was undoubtedly a significant investment. It demands skills from the people who fly and maintain it that are not easy to find. But making a success of it has required commercial acumen just as much as technical competence or flying proficiency. By bringing all of those elements together, Precision continues to expand the boundaries of what is possible for both the company and the aircraft.
“I think that we are going to adapt [the Super Puma] to other jobs,” Van Pelt said. “The idea is to put 16 fully loaded firefighters in the back of this aircraft and be able to deliver them to a fire, all while doing it not under the rules of Part 91 Public Aircraft but meeting the high standards of Part 135 Air Carrier operations for 10 or more passengers.”
A large machine with tremendous capability, yet still nimble enough to be deployed into tight niches, the Super Puma seems to share many of the characteristics of the company that operates, maintains, modifies, and supports it.
The scale of the fires it is deployed to fight in the initial attack role might seem paradoxical. To Rath, however, the contrast between the size of the fire and the size of the asset deployed against it comes down to one thing: decisive results.
“We’re going after the puff of smoke,” he said. “We’re going after the very small fires, the initial indications that there may be a risk, and we’re going out to smash it.”
