"To professional firefighters, though, it was a prime example of a “political air show,” the high-profile use of expensive aircraft to appease elected officials."
“CNN drops.”
In many of the fires we have here in the CA central coast, air support is absolutely critical. Especially when there are Santa Ana winds blowing down the mountains towards civilization.
When a fire is reported during the high fire season, the standard response is: “four fire engines, two bulldozers, two hand crews, a water tender, two air tankers, an air-attack plane and a helicopter, plus a battalion chief to run the operation”. https://www.noozhawk.com/article/with_recent_rains_santa_bar...
We take fires very seriously here.
I have zero knowledge or expertise in forest management or wildfire fighting, but I suspect there isn’t a simply a single method that’s more effective. Meaningful progress likely requires an interrelated system of measures spanning education, policy, understanding risk tolerances, prevention and response. But if expensive response measures — with low-efficacy — are taken primarily for political reasons, I’d love to see the political value shift to more boring proactive measures. With that said, I don’t have any understanding/data on efficacy of tankers, or what proactive measures would be more valuable, just thinking aloud.