“For quite some time, we were the cheapest flight school on the planet,” he said with a laugh, recalling the sheer audacity of it. When he wasn’t teaching, he’d take the little R22 up into canyons near his home in Auburn and practice the tight maneuvers he’d have to execute when (not if) he got a job as an aerial firefighter.

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Jack Dolan is an investigative reporter for the Los Angeles Times. A winner of numerous national awards, he has twice been named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

We’ve all seen the dramatic news video: a plane swooping out of the sky and dropping a long line of bright red retardant on the leading edge of a fire racing up a hillside, or a helicopter, with a giant bucket of water dangling underneath, dousing the vegetation around someone’s house to save it from flames.

For Bryce Mitchell, a helicopter pilot for the Sacramento Metropolitan Fire District, that spark began when, as a teenager, he joined the department’s volunteer youth program. His first boss, Vanlandingham, remembers him as a “geeky kid” standing with a hose in his hand, gaping in wonder as he washed the helicopters.

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He hired a flight instructor to teach him to fly it, and once he accumulated enough hours to earn his own instructor’s certificate, he started a flying school.

If you are claiming the Emergency services volunteers exemption, report only the amount shown in box 14 of your T4 slips on line 10100.

Typical first jobs include teaching other students the basics, like simple take-offs and landings, or flying back and forth across vast rural landscapes surveying power lines and oil pipelines.

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When he started flight school after a brief career in sales, his first instructor asked him about his professional aspirations. Students almost always say the same thing: They want to become airline pilots and get paid huge salaries to travel the world in sleek jets.

Diving toward a burning hillside in his first season flying an air tanker for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, Jeff Reynolds realized he was doing just about everything his early flight instructors warned him not to.

“The mortgage doesn’t matter. Your interpersonal relationships don’t matter. Your brain is focused in a way that is wildly healthy for you,” Mitchell said.

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One of his most memorable assignments was towing a banner for the Los Angeles Kings over downtown after the team won the Stanley Cup. He wasn’t expecting all of the news helicopters hovering over the parade.

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But Reynolds is among a small, and shrinking, fraternity of experienced aviators willing to eschew the relative luxury and high pay offered by large passenger airlines or private jet companies — think crisp white shirts and first-class lounges — for the hot, dirty, dangerous work of aerial firefighting.

Today, when he explains to other pilots what he does, he says they get an odd look on their faces and ask if it’s a “summer gig” or something he’s doing while waiting for a chance with a major airline. “No, this is actually my career,” he explains.

It was beginner’s luck, not skill, that saved him from slamming into that mountain, Reynolds said. The hillside was off to the right and he was already turning left. But that moment of shock still haunts him years later.

One of his first flying jobs was towing advertising banners, first in Florida and then in Southern California out of the Compton airport. “I was back in sales,” Reynolds said. “I sold sunscreen, vodka, condoms … everything.”

You can combine the hours you volunteered for both search and rescue, and firefighter activities to claim either the VFA or SRVA. However, if you were also employed by the same organization other than as a volunteer for the same or similar duties, you cannot include any hours related to that organization in determining if you have met the 200-hour threshold.

Then, he became the crew chief, directing the rescuers and handling navigation and communications while the pilot flew. There can be 10 radio channels chattering in your headset at once, Mitchell said, and all of it is critical information: reports from other aircraft on the scene, firefighters on the ground, air traffic controllers directing the coordinated chaos.

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He’ll never earn the big money flying wide-body planes to Tokyo, or ferrying celebrities to the Cannes Film Festival on luxury private jets. But he does get to save lives and homes.

You can claim $3,000 for the volunteer firefighters' amount (VFA) or search and rescue volunteers' amount (SRVA), but not both, if you meet all of the following conditions:

“How do you get that spark in someone,” Anderson asked, to endure the grueling apprenticeship for a job that comes with unpredictable hours and unavoidable risks? It isn’t easy. “They have to really want it. It has to be something that burns in them.”

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But with the country at peace, the steady pipeline of military pilots with thousands of hours at the controls in high-stress situations is slowing. And it’s not just the number of pilots that’s shrinking; it’s the number of hours pilots in the military are able to accumulate.

The pay is terrible, the locations are often remote, and the work is monotonous. And it can take years to build up the thousands of hours of experience required to even be considered for a job such as aerial firefighting.

It can easily cost a civilian student $100,000 to get the bare minimum of time at the controls of an airplane they’ll need for commercial certification, which is what’s required for even the humblest entry-level jobs. In a helicopter, it can be twice as expensive.

He regards all flying as “ultra-condensed meditation.” When you’re so focused on the task at hand, whether it’s diving in a helicopter at roaring flames or carving a perfect line in a wingsuit, nothing else matters.

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That’s when he noticed an odd white shape at eye level out the windshield. It was a utility truck — at the same altitude as him — crawling along a hillside he did not expect to be there. The hair stood up on his forearms.

He was a little off target, so a controller told him to go around and try again. Still burdened with about 1,000 gallons of fire retardant, he shoved the throttles forward to squeeze more power from the howling engines and pulled back on the controls to start an agonizingly slow climb.

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For Reynolds, the spark ignited when he was growing up in Rancho Cucamonga, watching planes drop fire retardant in the San Gabriel Mountains.

They wash their own planes and pump their own gas. They wear dumpy overalls. Most get paid a fraction of what captains at United and American airlines make, and they die at an alarming rate.

An official tally of the number of aerial firefighters working in the U.S. is hard to come by, but industry veterans guess there are a few hundred working directly for government agencies and perhaps twice as many working for private contractors.

As a volunteer firefighter or search and rescue volunteer, you may be eligible to claim a $1,000 exemption for each eligible employer instead of the VFA or SRVA. For more information, see Emergency services volunteers.

Incident management is a series of steps taken to identify, analyze, and resolve critical incidents which could lead to issues in an organization.

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It was a white-knuckle test of his airmanship, Reynolds recalled. “I literally had to weave in and out of them ... like pylons.”

For perspective, not one of the nation’s more than 100,000 scheduled passenger airline pilots has been killed in an accident since 2020.

The CRA may ask you to provide certification from the fire department or the search and rescue organization to confirm the number of hours of eligible volunteer firefighting or search and rescue volunteer services you performed.

On a really hot day, hovering over a riverbed in a broiling canyon, the underpowered machine acted a lot like a bigger, more powerful helicopter at higher elevations over a raging wildfire. It was surprisingly good practice, Mitchell said.

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Work schedules for aerial firefighters vary depending on the employer. Some contractors work year-round, traveling the globe and flying wherever the land is burning and someone is willing to pay for their services.

It’s hard not to gasp in awe at the power and capability of those machines. And, in a state where wildfires of previously unimaginable size and destructive force have become the norm, it’s hard to imagine anyone more indispensable than those pilots.

Others work only during “fire season,” which in the Western U.S. used to be confined to the hottest, driest summer months but has been expanding in length and intensity in recent years. And it’s not a Monday-to-Friday job: Most pilots work something close to 10 days in a row followed by five days off.

Aerial firefighting is “the closest thing to combat flying you’ll find in civilian life,” said Montie Vanlandingham, a recently retired chief pilot for the Sacramento Metropolitan Fire District who spent more than 20 years flying Army helicopters, including tours in Afghanistan.

With the airplane’s hollow wings full of fuel and the belly full of fire retardant, he was “flying heavy” in hot, thin air. He was also going low and slow, simultaneously reducing the plane’s maneuverability while giving himself a razor-thin margin for error. And he was deliberately diving into smoke so thick he couldn’t see other aircraft or the terrain around him.

So when Reynolds confessed he wanted to fly grimy old air tankers, his instructor didn’t know how to react. The goal must have seemed inconceivably “blue collar,” Reynolds joked.

They exchanged information, and soon he too was flying air attack for a small private contractor all over the Western United States. A couple of years later, he got his dream job flying a Vietnam War-era air tanker and diving directly at the flames.

To be eligible, a search and rescue organization has to be a member of the Search and Rescue Volunteer Association of Canada, Civil Air Search and Rescue Association, or Canadian Coast Guard Auxiliary, or its status as a search and rescue organization has to be recognized by a provincial, municipal, or public authority. Your search and rescue organization can tell you if it is eligible.

Dan Anderson, an instructor pilot for Cal Fire, spent decades in the Army and flew medevac helicopters in Iraq and Afghanistan. On a combat tour, he could rack up 500 flight hours in a year, Anderson said. Today, many military pilots are lucky to get 80 hours a year, he said, which makes a huge difference in their comfort and familiarity with the aircraft.

Since 2020, there have been at least 14 fatal crashes of airplanes and helicopters fighting fires in the U.S, killing at least 25 pilots and crew members, according to a Times review of data maintained by the National Transportation Safety Board.

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He swooned and struck up a conversation. She was, in fact, flying “air attack,” essentially acting as the airborne air traffic controller over a nearby inferno.

It took seven years and 3,000 hours of flight time for Reynolds to get his first break in aerial firefighting. In 2016, he was working for a private charter company, piloting the equivalent of an airborne limousine. He had dropped some clients off at the Monterey airport when he noticed a woman washing ash and dead bugs off the front of her plane, telltale signs she had been flying low and slow over a wildfire.

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In one memorable case, a pilot lost his bearings after a plane above and in front of him dumped its load of retardant on his windshield, cloaking his view. He dumped his own retardant to become more maneuverable, but that just made him lighter and faster. He climbed straight into the plane in front of him, killing both pilots.

In addition to flying in his free time, Mitchell spent years working his way up the pecking order in the department’s aerial operations. He began as a rescuer, the guy who dangles beneath the helicopter on a cable to save injured — or just terrified — hikers and skiers stuck in spaces that are too steep and sketchy for the helicopter to land.

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If you claim the $3,000 volunteer firefighters' amount or search and rescue volunteers' amount, add the amounts shown in boxes 87 and 14 of your T4 slips and enter the result on line 10100. Enter $3,000 on line 31220 or line 31240 of your return.

Jonathan Rohloff is still reeling from the horror of watching his 20-year-old daughter slide to her death off Yosemite’s Half Dome. He said his request for more safeguards on the century-old climbing cables that lead to the summit has met with “deafening” silence from park officials.

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If you choose to claim this income exemption, you will not be eligible for the VFA or SRVA. The income exemption related to emergency services volunteers is shown in box 87 of your T4 slips.

Planes have slammed into burning mountainsides. A helicopter crashed after the hose it used to suck water from a lake broke free and got tangled in the rotor blades.

So, when he got hired by the department as an entry-level firefighter, he didn’t spend his first paychecks on a fancy new truck, or “brodozer,” as so many of his contemporaries did. He lived in a van and spent every penny he had on a small $60,000 training helicopter.

He has arranged his whole life around aviation. On his days off, he builds experimental planes or goes BASE jumping with friends. But he cringes when anyone suggests he’s an adrenaline junkie.