Here is a great video from myfirevideos.net sponsored by wildland fire lessons learned center. The speaker on this video is Bill Waldman, a 40-year veteran air tanker pilot and recently retired from Aero Union where he was the chief pilot. During his long career he logged over 10,000 hours in flight time, making over 13,000 retardant drops. In this video, part of the lessons learned series of the wildland fire lessons learned center, he speaks about the lessons he learned during his career as a wildland firefighter whose tool is an aircraft. While speaking directly to other tanker pilots and crew, I believe that the lessons he learned are applicable to ground crews, other emergency services workers, as well as us civilians. I learned a lot from watching this video.
The most important thing that I took from watching this video, and I have watched a couple of times by now, is the importance of safety. That is, Mr. Waldman offers this advice to firefighting aircraft pilots (young and old):
What we do is a job, it is not an emergency. Don't risk your life and die over a tree. That is primary. Do a job, do it safely, and go home at night.
Plan on spending about 15 minutes to watch the video.
If the above link doesn't work, go to
myfirevideos.net and look for a video called "I am a wildland firefighter - aircraft is my tool. I'd like to thank Bill Gabbert who posted about this same video
here. You might want to check out Bill's article to see the comments a couple of air tanker pilots made to Bill's article.
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