“I think firefighting can get there,” said Coulson, referring to military-style attack patterns, inspired by the AH-64 Apache. “That’s really where our main focus is on the rotary-wing side right now.”

DART Aerospace, headquartered in Montreal, also makes a 3,050-US gal (11,545-L) tank for the CH-47D Chinook that takes about one minute to refill, with rapid roll-on/roll-off installation and removal.

The TASER came under scrutiny by the federal and state governments. The TASER was being demonstrated at the International Security Conference in New York when the NYPD shut it down because the weapon was deemed a firearm and it required a permit under state law. Because the TASER used gunpowder to propel the darts, the ATF was able to classify it as a “Title II” weapon, putting it in the same category as tommy guns, bombs, and silencers. In 1977, after some modifications, it was reclassified as an ordinary firearm. This allowed more registered gun owners to purchase them, but the government still retained the power to regulate its use.

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The Kawak tank has a 50-horsepower auxiliary hydraulic pump system and a complementary 128-US gal (484-L) foam tank, along with a fixed snorkel that can hover over any water source and refill the tank in 40 seconds with a 4,000-US gal-per-minute (15,100-L-per-minute) fill rate, the company said.

In the literal — and figurative — heat of a high-stakes aerial firefighting battle, the speed and intensity of a water drop is one of the most crucial determinants of success.

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United Rotorcraft completes installations of Kawak tanks and snorkels, and newer models are fitted with second-generation tanks with better baffles and drop patterns, Mills said. The Firehawk’s retractable snorkel deploys in about five seconds and also does not use the hook cavity, allowing Firehawk operators to use the hook for search-and-rescue and hoist missions.

Overhead, a trio of Boeing CH-47 Chinook helicopters swoop over the blaze, each dropping thousands of gallons of water, flame retardant, foam or gel. The first aircraft transmits its flow rate and drop pattern through a wide area augmentation system (WAAS)-corrected GPS in a meshed network, passing data to the next helicopter in line, which begins its own water drop with little overlap. The next helicopter in line does the same.

New products are being developed, often in secret, and existing products are being fine-tuned in response to changing conditions in the real world.

On the forest-filled, tinder-dry outskirts of a densely populated California community in the not-too-distant future, flames tear through thickets of trees at an alarming rate. The so-called “Super Bowl of aerial firefighting” is in full swing, and like gritty linebackers defending an end zone, fire crews work quickly and methodically to stop the blaze before it spreads.

“We still run them,” said Coulson, referring to the S-61s. “They have a great cabin. We have all the STCs [supplemental type certificates] and approvals to do rappel and hoist operations out of them, so they do still have a life out there. But we’re not investing in any different tanks or any major technological advancements in those. We’re really focused on the ‘super-heavies’ … large helitankers and airtankers.”

In 1990, Rick and Tom Smith bought their mother a gun for her birthday, but they began to wonder if there was a better alternative than a deadly weapon. They came up with the idea to revolutionize the  TASER so they bought the company and patent owned by Jack Cover. They subsequently employed Cover in their new company, AIR TASER, Inc. based in Scottsdale, AZ.

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It’s something Coulson Aviation identified early, as it designed its proprietary 3,000-US gallon (11,300-liter) retardant aerial delivery system – large (RADS-L) tank for CH-47 Chinook firefighting helicopters. Unlike other tanks, it disperses liquid through a large linear hole cut in the floor of the aircraft, making massive drops with a high level of precision, thanks in part to a touchscreen in-cockpit controller that automatically adjusts the flow rate.

“I think the Black Hawk’s a great aircraft,” Coulson said. “It’s very reliable, the pilots love it, maintenance loves it. The contracts just need to be more viable to be able to get back into that again.”

In 1970, he created TASER Systems, Inc. headquartered in City of Industry, California. The name TASER is an acronym derived from one of his favorite childhood books, “Tom Swift and his Electric Rifle.” The "A" was added for easier pronunciation. The 1911 story chronicles the adventures of Tom Swift and his rifle that shoots bolts of electricity.

Robert Bowling is a retired police officer from Fishers (IN) and Durham (NC) police departments. In retirement, he has continued his passion to honor fallen officers. He is an Ambassador for the National Law Enforcement Memorial, as well as an historical researcher for the Officer Down Memorial Page. He also has a passion for history, focusing primarily on law enforcement history. He is a member of the Police History Society and is the author of the book Wicked Fishers. He currently teaches Criminal Justice for a local high school.

“The feedback we get from the agencies that fly the Firehawk is that they love it,” Mills said. “It’s a very maneuverable aircraft, it carries a very good payload, it’s fast, and it’s very reliable.”

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The company’s first weapon, the Air  TASER, was designed to address the problems that hindered the original TASER invented by Cover. Instead of using gunpowder, the Air TASER used compressed air. This was a major change because the  TASER was no longer considered a firearm and therefore was free from regulation. The Air TASER also addressed the issue of criminal use by implementing “anti-felon” dots. When the TASER is deployed, small paper dots are ejected which contain the weapon’s serial number that can be traced back to the seller and buyer.

TASER International became a publicly traded company in 2001. The company expanded into the body camera market in 2008. With that success, the company renamed itself Axon in 2017.

After he acquired the patent, the TASER went into production with the hopes that it would be used by the airlines. However, when the airlines opted to go with searches and metal detectors, he turned his focus towards law enforcement as the first alternative to the gun. TASER unveiled their first weapon, named the “Public Defender” in March 1975 at a cost of $200.

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DART Aerospace also developed a Blackhawk Fire Attack System, with a 900-US gal (3,400-L) internal roll-on/roll-off tank that can be removed or installed in 15 minutes and has a fill time of less than one minute, the company said.

As wildfires continue to grow in number, size and intensity, aerial firefighting companies know they need to adapt quickly. Continued innovation is a non-negotiable requirement, and the industry has embraced that principle.

This new version is designed for “simple and reliable operation,” with parts that are readily accessible for inspection, repair, replacement and cleaning. The controls are similar to previous-generation torches, making the transition between models easy, the Forest Service said.

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“The beauty of the heavy lift aircraft is that it carries a bigger payload,” said Andrew Mills, vice president of business development at Kawak Aviation. “It’s a fast, reliable, heavy-punch payload helicopter …  the feedback we get from our customers is that they love the tanked Chinook, and the [U.S.] Forest Service loves the tanked Chinook.”

Coulson Aviation built its expertise on nighttime firefighting with its fleet of legacy Sikorsky S-76 and S-61 helicopters, the latter of which was for many years the workhorse of its rotorcraft fleet.

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An unanticipated benefit of this capability is the retractable snorkels’ performance in cold weather conditions. Coulson cited the company’s experience with aerial firefighting in South Korea, where the fire season carries over into winter.

Another key innovator on firefighting Chinooks includes Kawak Aviation in Bend, Oregon, which makes a 2,500-US gal (9,460-L) internal tank exclusively for Billings Flying Service in Montana. Billings has, in turn, resold several Kawak CH-47 tanks to PJ Helicopters in Red Bluff, California.

As of September 2023, Kawak was in the midst of another multi-aircraft contract for an unspecified customer that would bring the total fleet population up to 24. Deliveries of two systems were imminent for the Orange County fire department, Mills said.

Both Coulson Aviation and Kawak have developed retractable snorkels and belly tanks for Sikorsky S-70i and UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters, which are massively influential among firefighting operations in North America, particularly in California.

Jack Cover died in 2009 at the age of 88 from Alzheimer’s disease but he will forever be remembered for his innovative invention that forever changed law enforcement.

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“That’s kind of the mode we’re working on,” said Britton Coulson, president and chief operating officer at Coulson Aviation, the renowned international firefighting company based in Port Alberni, British Columbia. “[We’re] employing new technology, new programming — using military-derived tech to size up the fire, and then be able to allocate a drop to it.”

The company began to experiment with other devices such as the Auto TASER. An auto theft device that resembled The Club, it attaches to the steering wheel. The device emits a five second alarm when it detects that someone has entered the vehicle. After the alarm sounds, a jolt of electricity is administered to anyone that lingers near the steering wheel. It was endorsed by the National Fraternal Order of Police. But it also came with plenty of criticism, as one attorney remarked, “This is by far the most egregious example...of a product that allows people to take the law into their own hands.”

In June 2023, the British Columbia Wildfire Service released a YouTube video of a Bell 429 helicopter dropping burning gelled gasoline onto a swath of coniferous trees. The video went viral, prompting media explainers and drawing public attention to another long-held aerial firefighting technique that has recently been updated by enterprising engineers.

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Meanwhile, SEI Industries in Delta, B.C., developed another helicopter-mounted device for controlled burns called the Red Dragon. It dispenses large quantities of “aerial spheres” called Dragon Eggs, injected with flammable ethylene glycol. The system was patented in the U.S. in 2014 and uses a quick-purge dispenser system controlled with a hand-held remote.

At the same time, firefighting buckets remain a key tool for aerial crews around the world. SEI Industries and its Bambi Bucket systems have been in use for decades, with multiple models and quick-fill functionality.

The company was headed towards bankruptcy in 1980 when the LAPD gave it a much needed shot in the arm. LAPD had rejected the TASER twice during the 1970’s but an officer involved shooting in 1979 made the department take a third look. Eula Love, a 39 year old widow in south central Los Angeles, was shot eight times by two officers. They originally responded to a dispute between her and a gas company representative over an unpaid bill of $22. The officers claimed that she “menaced” them with a knife before they opened fire. Although the officers were cleared of any wrongdoing, the department began to explore other less lethal options.

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Until recently, Coulson was working on a RADS-M (medium) tank for its three Black Hawk helicopters — essentially a smaller version of its Chinook tank with similar capabilities — but has shelved that project temporarily as it waits for more favorable market conditions.

The TASER has become one of the most popular less-lethal options for law enforcement. According to Reuters, they are used by more than 90% of the roughly 18,000 law enforcement agencies in the U.S. Civilian demand for the weapon increased by 300% in 2020 compared to the previous year, mostly driven by social unrest and rising violent crime rates. That contributed to the largest TASER contract in history—a $20 million deal with an undisclosed customer. But as popular as the TASER has become, it is hard to imagine that it was mostly rejected by law enforcement. The TASER originally began as one man’s invention created in a garage. The company was on the verge of bankruptcy until two brothers turned it into a multi-million dollar industry.

For several years, B.C. has leveraged the helitorch, a large external drum of gelled gasoline suspended under the helicopter to create prescribed burns, as a proactive wildfire containment tool.

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This kind of coordinated aerial fire brigade is a page out of the U.S. Military playbook, mimicking the attack patterns of Boeing AH-64 Apache helicopters on the battlefield. And while it’s not yet a common capability among firefighters in North America, it may be a key part of the industry’s next wave of innovation.

“I think there will continue to be increased demand for firefighting helicopters,” Mills said. “That means they need more aircraft, and those aircraft are going to require rugged, reliable aerial dispersal systems — tanks and buckets. There’s a place for both … we do see a requirement for continued innovation.”

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“The program has been extremely successful,” Coulson said. “Anything that we’ve been out at night, we’ve been able to work with the ground crews and catch. Between us and our agency partners, there hasn’t been any fire that’s gone beyond the nighttime that we’ve fought. We see so much success with the larger assets. That’s really where we’re focused, on optimizing those — leveraging the new technology both with our tanking system, as well as NVGs.”

Aerial firefightinghelicopter

Another equally important innovation is the ability to stifle fires with heavy-lift helicopters at night, using crews with night vision goggles (NVGs). Coulson Aviation is the only company in the world with this capability on heavy-lift helicopters, primarily leveraging the Chinook platform.

Retractable snorkels also make it possible to hover-taxi at airports when returning to base, Coulson said. This simplifies the process and avoids potential hazards when a fixed snorkel dangles from the aircraft and needs to be captured and guided by ground crews.

This military-style evolution is part of an industry-wide response to the growing prevalence and increasing intensity of wildfires around the world. Canada’s disastrous 2023 wildfire season, paired with busy seasons in California and elsewhere, have added urgency to the innovation agendas of aerial firefighting operations that feel the need to consistently raise their game.

At a glance, rapid-fill snorkels might seem like small, insignificant features. But in reality, they’re an extremely useful technology that appears to be making a huge impact in the field.

A new-generation version helitorch was designed and built in 2019 by the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service, through the National Technology and Development Program, for use in the U.S. The system uses a propane flame, created by an electric spark, to ignite gelled fuel that flows out of a 55-US gal (208-L) fuel drum and through a fuel transfer pump.

At Coulson Aviation, military-style technology — including meshed networks that share in-flight data between helicopters to blanket a fire more effectively with multiple aircraft — is front-of-mind.

Thanks for this great overview – how far away are we from analysing drop patterns in situ as you mention in the beginning of the article? For now, the number of scientific publications is fairly low, we’d love to see whether there is potential to study these in more detail. Best,

Retractable snorkels provide operators with enhanced flexibility in the field, refilling in a matter of seconds without returning to base, and in some cases, making it possible to carry out one drop every 10 minutes on missions that can last more than two hours.

States began to pass legislation banning the sale, possession, and manufacture of stun guns. With the restrictions by the federal and state governments, the company was losing money. They decided to change their focus audience from law enforcement to the general public. The  TASER was given a new name, the TF76.

“We will expand it to other sizes, but it’s kind of unique in that it’s more of a vertical bucket in shape, and it has a very rugged, robust, stainless steel frame at the bottom,” Mills said. “So when you drop it into the water, it sinks immediately, straight down, which makes it fill faster … it’s one more tool in the arsenal for firefighters. We’ve sold several of them already, and we expect to be producing those in higher quantities in the next year.”

“We call it the ‘Super Bowl of firefighting’ because there is no next ridge,” said Coulson, referring to the demanding conditions of southern California. “The ‘next ridge’ is $100 million in homes and a bunch of people. So you have to hit [the fire] as hard and as fast as possible, even if it’s not in the ideal terrain.”

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The company’s Sling Dragon aerial ignition system resembles a helitorch in some ways, dispensing one-inch Dragon Eggs from a hopper slung beneath a helicopter, delivering up to 225 projectiles per minute and utilizing available GPS tracking.

Aerial firefightingCanada

In 2023, Kawak Aviation introduced its new Cascade collapsible water bucket, with a 900-US gal (3,400-L) capacity and 1,600-US gal-per-minute (6,000-L-per-minute) fill rate via a high-powered pump. The Cascade is lighter than competing buckets but also reliable and scalable for different needs, the company said.

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The LAPD became the largest police agency to use the  TASER and it was reported that it was used on average 2 to 3 times a day. While more police agencies began to use the  TASER, it was still not at the level that Cover had envisioned. Civilian sales were hampered by strict state and federal regulations. But in the early 1990’s, two brothers from Arizona would change all of that and turn Cover’s company into a multi-million dollar publicly owned company.

During the 1960s, a new weapon was being developed that would immobilize but not kill a person. This new weapon was the TASER, invented by Jack Cover. Growing up in Chicago, he received his doctorate in physics from the University of Chicago. He trained as a nuclear physicist studying under Enrico Fermi, who created the first nuclear reactor and Edward Teller, “father of the hydrogen bomb.” During WWII, he served as an Army test pilot before becoming a NASA aerospace engineer where he assisted on the Apollo moon landing program. In his spare time, he was an avid inventor creating voice-activated switches, cooked food testers, and an electric toothbrush. But the TASER is what he will most be remembered for.

At night, temperatures drop and humidity rises, creating an advantage for firefighters. And since there are fewer aircraft flying after dark, the less-crowded airspace, populated only by specially trained Coulson and agency pilots, is seen as safer for operators.

“Just by the method of rolling it up, it squeegees the water out, so you have way less residual in there,” he said. “The snorkel head also can’t ice up because it’s sitting inside the outer mold line of the helicopter. Cold weather operations are something we hadn’t really identified when we designed [the retractable snorkel], but it’s a night-and-day difference in those type of [operations], compared to fixed snorkels.”

Those platforms continue to fly, using NVGs and a high-powered laser pointer to pinpoint the ideal drop zone using an S-76 supervision helicopter equipped with a forward-looking infrared (FLIR) thermal camera.

Kawak is the sole provider of belly tanks and retractable snorkel systems for the Firehawk iteration of the aircraft, which first entered the market about 20 years ago and has 20 active platforms in California with Cal Fire, the Los Angeles County Fire Department, and fire departments in San Diego, Ventura County and Santa Barbara County.

The tank is certified by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) for day or night visual flight rules (VFR) missions and has a hover refill pump with dual ground fill ports, an available crew chief cabin for transporting firefighters, and an independent foam system.

In 2004, the X26 debuted which was lighter and 60% smaller than the M26. It came with a unique feature that records the date, time, and duration of the shock. This was added to protect the officer from false allegations. The company continues to design new products such as the X2, a two shot TASER which eliminates the need to reload, or their newest weapon and most effective, the TASER 7.

Aerial firefightingaircraft

While the  TASER was originally targeted for law enforcement, only ten out of the first 1,000 units went to police departments. A majority of the sales were to private citizens and it wasn’t long before criminals began to use the  TASER during the commission of crimes. The first reported incident was in Miami when a  TASER was used on a gas station clerk during a robbery. The  TASER was traced back to a robbery of a gun store two weeks earlier in which nine  TASERs were stolen. Another incident occurred when four robbers used a TASER to torture a couple in Blue Bell, PA. The problem with the TASER was that it was unregulated and could be bought through mail order ads in magazines and through unlicensed dealers.

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While the company had put together a great marketing program, it was met with much criticism. Doctors testified that the TASER posed major hazards to those suffering from heart related issues. It was for this reason that law enforcement mostly rejected it. After a brief trial period, a lieutenant from Akron, OH called the  TASER “a horrible device that should be banned from the marketplace.” However, some departments like Nashville praised it as an effective police weapon.

In 1999, the company was renamed TASER  International. It also debuted a new model, the M26 TASER. This model was designed to resemble more of a handgun than a flashlight. It still maintained the 50,000 voltage but only for five seconds. Along with the “anti-felon” dots, it had an internal tracking device that kept track of the number of times the trigger was pulled. It had a button trigger instead of a firearm trigger and it came with yellow striping to distinguish it from a firearm and was equipped with laser sights. The TASER probes were extended to 21 feet from 15 feet. There were two versions, one for law enforcement and the other for the general public.

The TASER was promoted as “the first effective means of defense that does not destroy living tissue or vital organs.” There was very little muzzle velocity and it was compared to being hit with a Ping Pong ball. The company pointed out that there was a chance that the electricity could injure someone with a pacemaker or who suffers from heart disease, but there is “no weapon, technique, or procedure for subduing attackers or restraining crowds that does not involve some risk of injury.”