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GCN Home > 10/09/06 issue

Air traffic control on the fire line

GCN Agency Award | Forest Service’s Web-based tracking system and Google’s 3-D imagery help make fighting wildfires more safe, efficient

By David Essex, Special to GCN

People don’t normally think of the Agriculture Department’s Forest Service as an aviation agency. But in fact it owns approximately 50 aircraft and contracts out up to 2,200 more a year. They’re the single-engine planes and giant air tankers that spray flame retardant on wildfires, and the helicopters that carry first responders to dangerous hot spots on the ground.

“Situational awareness” is critical in coordinating the air and ground assault, but until recently, the communication system was only partly automated. Ground personnel marked fire locations in pencil on paper maps and called or faxed the information to headquarters.

So in 1999, the Forest Service partnered with the Bureau of Land Management to plan a computerized Automated Flight Following (AFF) system and started bringing it online two years later.

AFF is literally a potential lifesaver for the people on the aircraft, which often fly in areas below or outside of radar coverage. It will improve the safety of firefighters and residents and save money by directing resources more efficiently, according to Robert Roth, the USFS aviation management specialist in Missoula, Mont., who serves as AFF program manager.

The agencies began outfitting aircraft with Global Positioning System receivers that transmit position data every two minutes to a satellite that relays it in seconds back to Dell database servers at the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho. The center also has load-balanced Web servers to handle spikes in demand from 8,000 users, according to Roth.

“The heart of the technology is getting the position reports back to the server in Boise,” said Ken Kokjer, a telecommunications planner for BLM’s Alaska Fire Service, who served on the AFF steering committee. “There are six to seven vendors that we take feeds from,” said Kokjer, who drew on his background as an electrical engineer to find the best satellite radios.

Consolidation is the trick

Impressive as the space-age technology sounds, the biggest achievement of Roth and partner Neil Flagg, senior programmer at the Forest Service, could be consolidating high-resolution imagery on back-end systems from multiple sources, then making it accessible from a single screen.

More news on related topics: Communications / Networks, Business Process Management, Management, IT Management



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