Waiting in the wings: Helicopter pilots stationed in Smithville await call to fight fires

For Jay Soukiassian, an Army helicopter pilot turned aerial firefighter, battling a wildfire from above is a lot like combat.

Each battle is highly dynamic, urgent and invokes a surge of adrenaline that keeps your senses sharp. From the cockpit, a pilot is coordinating with five different people on five different radios across numerous frequencies. Good visibility can disappear in smoke.

But there is one crucial difference, Soukiassian said: the fear factor. Whereas helicopter pilots navigating a combat zone face gunfire, those that dump buckets of water on complex wildfires feel the heat that rises and turns the fuselage into an oven.

“Nobody’s shooting at you, but in combat you’re not flying over 100-foot flames coming off a ridgeline with the wind pushing you down while you’re trying to go up,” said Soukiassian, who did tours in Afghanistan and Kosovo flying Black Hawks and Chinooks.

He and a small crew of aerial firefighters with the U.S. Forest Service are currently stationed at the small Smithville Municipal Airport as the wildfire threat in southeast Texas grows high.

Some of them, such as Wallace Dillon from Atlanta, Ga., and Terrell McCalister from Beaumont, have been stationed there for two weeks. Bill Carothers, the helicopter manager from Asheville, N.C., has been around a week. Soukiassian, a contract pilot who is on the forest service’s call-when-needed list, flew in from his Oxnard, Calif., home Sept. 11. All were summoned by the Texas Forest Service, which calls on federal resources to stage extra firefighting units to attack fires that flare up anywhere across the region.

With little precipitation falling over the last three months, the sun and high heat have baked the grasses and shrubs into tinder. The forest service monitors the drought index, wind speeds, temperatures, humidity and fuel moisture, all of which can combine to create perfect conditions for wildfires to ignite.

Until then, the aerial firefighters await orders from the Texas Forest Service’s dispatch command center in College Station.

“(We’re) doing a lot of sitting around — that’s the story of our business,” Soukiassian said. “We’re here to be here when they call us.”

When they get the call, as they did most recently for a fire near Victoria, it usually takes them 10 to 15 minutes to get off the ground. Soukiassian flies while Carothers mans the radios. Dillon and McCalister sit behind and keep watch against power lines, cell towers and, increasingly, drones. When they reach the site, the crew searches for a body of water — ponds, lakes, rivers or the ocean, depending on location — and land. Then, crew members hook up a 200- to 400-gallon water bucket to the helicopter, and take flight again to fill the bucket with water and strategically dump it to help give ground units a fighting chance.

“Helicopters don’t primarily put fire out. We cool it off enough to where it can be attacked via the ground, or where it can be stopped by cutting a line with a dozer,” Soukiassian said.

At any moment, the U.S. Forest Service could deploy them to any other part of the country where wildfire conditions are more ripe. It’s a lifestyle they’ve grown to accept, and one that has erratically taken them across the country. Sometimes, it means spending Thanksgiving with your crew.

Each fire season ends with an emphatic “I’m done,” yet each off-season ends with “I can’t wait for it to start,” Soukiassian said.