The great airtanker debacle - US Forest Service firefighting airtanker fleet - includes related articles

American Forests, May-June, 1994 by Herbert E. McLean

The "flight plan" seemed simple: To update an aging airtanker fleet used for firefighting, the Forest Service encouraged some of its contract private airtanker operators to swap their older planes for newer, government excess models through a little-known exchange program. Then things went off course.

The headlines appearing last year in the Los Angeles Times, The Oregonian, and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer grabbed my attention like a field of poison-tipped cacti.

I pondered those startling articles, wondering how on earth the United States Forest Service, with its tanned silviculturists, friendly fireside naturalists, and eager ecosystem managers, could suddenly be bathed in such dubious illumination.

More particularly, as a forest journalist I began wondering how such a foul-up, involving critically needed aircraft, might affect our nation's forest firefighting capability at a moment of historic wildfire concern.

Fifty phone conversations and more than 60 pages of incoming FAXed data later, I found myself hopelessly removed from the forests I love. Instead, I was enmeshed in a veritable dog-hair thicket of ever-expanding and oft-conflicting allegations, sworn statements, documentary backup, newspaper reports, and fervent denials, plus a fabric of claims concerning Forest Service-Central Intelligence Agency connections that stretch continents away to places like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Angola.

The cast of characters? A document-toting government whistle blower-extraordinaire from Washington State, several Congressmen (Republican and Democratic), a resourceful Oregon airplane broker who made some big bucks, a ticked-off airtanker pilot, assorted Department of Agriculture and Forest Service officials (one of them fired)--the list goes on.

I can only agree with former Forest Service Chief Dale Robertson, who admitted to a House subcommittee last August (1993) in a mountainous understatement, "This has been poorly managed by the Forest Service."

Let's enter the shady thicket.

THE TRADE-OFF

In 1988 the Forest Service, needing to update an aging firefighting airtanker fleet experiencing structural failures and some fatal crashes, used the little-known Historical Aircraft Exchange Program to move newer, "government excess" C-30A Hercules and P-3A Orion turboprop aircraft from the military into the hands of its private-contractor airtanker fleet. The Forest Service selected four airtanker companies in the western U.S. and encouraged them to trade some of their older tankers--many dating back to World War II--for large, four-engine C-130s and P-3As.

The operators received the planes' titles and agreed to modify the newer aircraft for firefighting use at their own expense, and to use them only for Forest Service and other government-agency firefighting.

In the process, however, the Forest Service appears to have shown favoritism in selecting certain operators, and also to have averted the competitive bidding process in handling aircraft acquisitions. Both practices are questionable if not downright illegal under the Clayton and the Sherman Antitrust acts.

But something else was awry. Some of the planes traded in by the airtanker operators, reportedly worth as little as $10,000, were of no historical value and therefore weren't legally eligible for swapping under the Historical Aircraft Exchange Program, according to the Los Angeles Times. The Forest Service disputes this contention, claiming that 28 of the turned-in older planes are in museums across the nation.

As for those sophisticated C-130s being traded for the operators' older planes, the Forest Service valuated them at scrap-metal rates--maybe $15,000 a copy--for exchange purposes.

Oregon's Business Journal, in a series of scathing articles early last year, called the exchange a "government giveaway" and quoted an Air Force museum director in Dayton, Ohio, as saying, "Speaking as a taxpaying citizen, they [meaning the Forest Service] did a number on us."

The stakes in this unconventional procurement game rose considerably when one Roy Reagan, a former Air Force captain and airtanker pilot from Medford, Oregon, received approximately $1.2 million from his clients for brokering the deals and securing FAA certification for turning the C-130s into tankers, according to the Office of the Inspector General.

Where did Reagan's "commission" come from? From other excess C-130s supplied to him by the government through the operators he represented--if you can follow that.

In another odd twist, broker Reagan incorrectly claimed from time to time during his negotiations that he represented the Forest Service, according to that agency's official chronology of events--an obvious conflict of interest, let alone a misstatement of fact.

Despite all the twists and curves, the aircraft-swap program looked attractive to the chosen airtanker operators, even though they had to spend around $500,000 per plane to make them into airtankers. (In case you haven't guessed, the airtanker game is big business, with a fuel-up for four thirsty C-130 engines easily exceeding $4,000.)