Washington State NR Helitack

A few weeks ago, Washington Helitack Program under
the Washington DNR Fire and Aviation Program first came on my radar. At that time, I was involved with some other articles on this blog, but knew that I had to write an article Washington Helitack with links where you can read more about this helitack program. 

I understand that the Washington DNR has been using helicopters since sometime in the 1960s, and currently has five Huey Helicopters flying firefighting crews to fires. The Hueys are also equipped with bambi buckets. If you go to the Washington DNR Fire and; Aviation Page, you will see that:

DNR helicopters provide direct aviation support for initial attack, wildfire suppression operations on DNR-protected lands. If there is a need for extended attack and large fire support, assignments are on a case-by-case basis.

The Fire Aviation Crew is an elite firefighting team consisting of pilots, managers, support truck drivers, and firefighters. Currently, the program staffs 5-6 initial attack helicopters on a daily basis. Crews are available for dispatch throughout all of Washington State. Aircraft are off the ground and en route to the fire within five minutes of dispatch.

There are a couple of short pdf files that you can download and find out more about the Washington DNR helicopters, an about us document and a short history of the Washington DNR Fire and Aviation Program (with some photos of helos going back to the 1960s).

There is a nice flickr page of photos of the 2012 helitack training,. Here is an article on the 2012 Helitack training with a couple links for news coverage on the training. The Daily Sun News had a nice article (from 2010) where you can learn a little more about what is involved in helitack training.
For photos of the Washington Helitack crew, check out this flickr page. Finally, I found another nice article from the Yakima Herald, this one also from 2010, about helitack.

The video that I embedded above is from the 2005 season, you might want to check out the description of that video on this youtube page.