Military’s Self-Flying Helicopter Gets Modded to Fight Wildfires

courtesy Lockheed Martin

Fighting a wildfire requires a lot of manpower and a lot of equipment, including helicopters and airplanes for aerial support. The problem with the humans in those aircraft, however, is not only that do they put their lives at risk—and sometimes lose them—they’re not actually very efficient. Pilots need to do things like eat, use the bathroom, and sleep. That means spotter planes and water bombing helicopters spend more time on the tarmac than they do actually fighting fires.

That’s why Lockheed Martin decided to take the self-flying helicopter it developed for the battlefields of Afghanistan and send it to the combustible forests of the United States. The K-MAX, produced by Kaman Aerospace and outfitted for autonomous flying by Lockheed, flew thousands of missions in Afghanistan between 2011 and 2014, carried more than 4.5 million pounds of cargo, sometimes through areas that would be considered unacceptably risky for human pilots. It can carry up to 6,000 pounds of cargo at sea level and 4,300 pounds at 15,000 feet. Swap out a pallet of military supplies for an enormous bucket of water, and you’ve got a self-flying, fire-fighting chopper.

Earlier this month, Lockheed and Kaman took the K-MAX to an FAA drone test facility in upstate New York to demonstrate its capabilities for experts from the Department of the Interior, the Bureau of Land Management, and the Forest Service, the folks who manage much of the land that’s especially susceptible to wildfires.

The K-MAX fought a fire in a demonstration for government officials. Lockheed Martin

One thing a human can do that the K-MAX cannot is actually spot flames. So Lockheed gave the helicopter a partner: A five-pound quadcopter called the Indago, which used an infrared camera to locate the (controlled) fire and report back to a control center. Then the K-MAX, lugging a bucket that can hold hundreds of gallons of water, spent an hour flying dropping more than 2,800 gallons of water on the fire, with trips to a nearby pond for refills.

The goal of all firefighting aircraft is to make firefighters on the ground more effective at containing and ultimately extinguishing a fire. The need for a human in the cockpit makes them less effective. On top of limited flight times, human pilots don’t fly at night—operating just a few hundred feet above trees with limited visibility is simply too dangerous. The K-MAX can fly nearly continuously (stopping to refuel every two and a half hours or so) and with minimal oversight from ground controllers, even at night. This means that firefighters will be able to attack fires more continuously, particularly important in the early days of a fire when stopping the spread is easiest.

“Aircraft have been used to fight wildfires for 80 years,” says Neal Keating, head of Kaman. “We can provide the opportunity for [the government] to contain fires more quickly and at a lower cost.”