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DENVER (KDVR) — Eighty aircraft are currently deployed in Colorado, working to manage and fight fires, according to Larry Helmerick, fire information coordinator for the Rocky Mountain Area Coordination Center.

“As of last night, we are number one in the nation as far as fire priorities for support aircraft,” said Helmerick, explaining that just five days ago, there were only 50 aircraft deployed in the state.

“You don’t want to be number one in this business,” he said. “You want to be number 10, but this year we burned more than we did in 2019, but in 2018, we almost burned 2 million acres in the Rocky Mountain area, so we can’t predict. We plan for the worst and hope for the best. That’s how I look at it,” he said.

Helmerick said two DC-10s, very large air tankers with the capacity to carry more than 10,000 gallons of fire retardant, were just deployed to the Pine Gulch fire in the western part of the state. 

But the Global Supertanker, a 747 aircraft with the capability of holding more than 19,000 gallons of retardant is not available for Colorado at this time.

“The Forest Service is controlling where they go and when, and right now, they are in California,” said Melissa Lineberger, the chief of staff of the Colorado Division of Fire Prevention and Control.

Lineberger said Colorado has had a “Call When Needed” contract with the supertanker since 2017, but that agreement doesn’t allow Colorado to have any operational control over the aircraft.

“We do have a contract in place, and if they’re available and we order them, then we have access to them,” she said.  “If we order it and they’re available, then we pay a daily availability rate, and then we pay a flight-hour rate.”

Lineberger couldn’t say whether or not Colorado needs the aircraft to help fight the current fires.

“That’s a great question,” she said. “Fire managers are looking every day and trying to make those decisions, and the Global Supertanker works great on some of these front range fires. What we find for a lot of the fires that are burning right now in the mountains is that the smaller, more agile aircraft are actually a better fit…they’re smaller. They’re more nimble, and they can get into some of those more challenging spaces, and they have more operational capability at high altitude.”

Helmerick said Colorado has 45 fixed wing aircraft and 35 helicopters working the fires. Some are transporting retardant or dropping buckets of water over areas. Others are working as reconnaissance aircraft, monitoring hotspots or other areas of concern. Some aircraft are also used to guide the large airtankers over the areas that are burning.