Airtankers Starting to be Deployed for 2025 Wildfire Season

 The 2025 wildfire season has been underway for a few weeks now. As airtanker and helicopter companies finish annual maintenance on their aircraft they are beginning to deploy their aircraft as specified by their contracts (sorry I have no information on the 2025 tanker and helo contracts, see note 1 for more information). I rely on social media to learn what some contractors are doing and am aware that there is information about what individual contractors are doing that I don't have access to. I applaud the work that all contractors flying aircraft to support wildland firefighters on the ground during this wildfire season.

I have information about Neptune Aviation and 10 Tanker Air Carrier. 

According to a recent Facebook post by Neptune Aviation one of their tankers, Tanker 10, was deployed to a tanker base in Colorado Springs yesterday.

10 Tanker Air Carrier's, Tanker 914, has already been flying wildfires. The most recent wildfire T914 worked is the Apron Fire, here is a direct link to their Facebook post which I share below.

T 914 also worked wildfires in North and South Carolina a few weeks ago. (direct link)

Note 1: Thanks to Bill Gabbert's August 14, 2023 post on Fire Aviation (Bill died over a year ago) and his follow-up post on August 17, 2023 on the Forest Services 2023 one-year contract with an option for nine more years. Five companies were awarded a contract for a minimum of 10,000 each year: 10 Tanker Air Carrier LLC,  Aero Air LLC, Aero Flite Inc, Coulson Aviation USA, Inc, and Neptune Aviation, Inc. I do not know the status of the 2025 contracts, perhaps it is too early in the year to know the status of the 2025 contracts. Thanks to Bill linking to Govconwire and searching on "Forest Service", I found information on the following Forest Service Contracts, all are for a potential of ten years: Type1 helicopters in October 2024 to 38 vendors, Type2 helicopters in August 2023 to 44 companies, and Type 3 helicopters in April 2023 to 41 companies.