Following 34 years of continual growth and advancement as a company, Kestrel is a step ahead of the globe when it comes to aerial firefighting.
Being the first Australian-owned company to gain approval to do night aerial firefighting, which includes the ability to conduct hover fill operations from natural or man-made water sources, Kestrel’s managing director Ray Cronin said the past year had led to the massive milestone for the Mangalore company.
‘‘It’s the most significant thing that the aerial firefighting program has seen in a long time,’’ Mr Cronin said.
He said while others across the globe had been capable of night firefighting for some years, the standard procedure up until this point had been for pilots to land the aircraft before having the water pumped into the tank.
‘‘That’s been the international practice and we took it a leap further last March,’’ he said.
Mr Cronin said while places such as Los Angeles had airports scattered all around that were equipped with infrastructures for pilots to land and ground fill, Australia faced different circumstances.
‘‘In the Australian environment, we’ve got fast-running bush fires — they’re all over the place, they’re not in just a confined little basin like the Los Angeles basin,’’ he said.
‘‘So we have to be able to fill up from water sources anywhere — from private dams and lakes, to whatever we can find.’’
He said this was only possible by performing a hover fill.
‘‘So that requires the guys to deploy the snorkel and draw the water up whilst they’re in the hover, and that’s a very high workload,’’ he said.
Mr Cronin said although it required a high level of skill, introducing the new procedure increased Kestrel’s capabilities and chances of controlling Australian fires at a much earlier stage.
‘‘It’s worked very well, it’s been very successful — it’s the first time it’s been done in the world and has led to the success of the program this year,’’ he said.
But hover filling was not the only first for Kestrel in the past year — the Victorian crews have also done night firefighting for the first time in Australian history.
Putting night vision goggles to use, Mr Cronin said the company had gone through the steps of training pilots and building confidence in performing at any luminosity. For the time being, he said night firefighting was only being carried out as a continuation from a fire that started in daylight.
‘‘At the moment we’re only doing fires that the crews have flown over during the day, so they build up a mental picture of what the obstacles are and what the hazards are in the area, and then they’ll just continue into the night, fighting it up until a geographical boundary and then they’ll stop chasing it after that — because it becomes unsurveyed territory and we don’t want to go there,’’ he said.
Mr Cronin said while they were still in the early stages of taking on night firefighting, in coming years he hoped that it would become the norm and would be carried out regardless of what time the fire was ignited.
He said with many risks involved, Kestrel would take the appropriate steps to work toward the goal, though it would be a lengthy process.
‘‘It’s not that you can’t its just that there are risks there associated with doing that so we need to come up with a plan of how we can approach that,’’ he said.
Mr Cronin said while the advancement was a big success for the company, it was the everyday people within Victorian communities who would benefit.
‘‘You think of being able to keep going through the night, that makes a huge difference,’’ he said.
He said Kestrel was dedicated to providing aviation services in the best possible way and the recognition of their achievement was just an added bonus.