“Talent is a Flame; Genius is a Fire”  — Bernard Williams

Aerial fire-fighting is a dangerous, high-stakes business with little room for error. It’s also a big business—tragically so. In 2021, 58,985 wildfires blazed across 7.1-million U.S. acres. Since 1983, when official record-keeping began, the occurrence of wildfires in these United States has increased by a staggering 223%.

Humans cause 90% of wildfires; Californian humans primarily.

Among the myriad challenges presented by wildfires is the matter of training the valorous lunatics who pilot their aircraft into the turbulent, smokey miasma of backwoods infernos for purpose of combating the flames. Urban firefighters train in concrete structures filled with combustibles, then set alight under controlled conditions. Setting a forest ablaze to train a squadron of tanker-pilots and smoke-jumpers simply isn’t feasible.

Enter Bridger Aerospace Group, a Montana-based provider of aerial firefighting and wildfire management services; and Pretoria Engineering, a South Carolina firm specializing in aerospace product and system engineering. The two companies have partnered to develop a virtual-reality aerial-firefighting training program which, when complete, will be used to train Bridger’s pilots in the harrowing but essential art of snuffing wildfires.

In 2019, Pretoria launched its flagship project, Sim Your Plane. The program links a virtual reality headset and customized sensor kits to flight controls, thereby converting actual aircraft into realistic flight simulators. Utilizing the Sim Your Plane technology, Pretoria will create a digital version of Bridger’s fleet, by which the latter’s pilots will fly—virtually—the very aircraft to which they’re accustomed into realistic wildfire environments.  

Digitally duplicating aerial-firefighting’s dreadful ambiance is a tricky proposition. To get it right, Pretoria is collaborating directly with Bridger’s most experienced pilots—as only those who’ve dallied in Hell can speak intelligently of its adornments. Bridger and Pretoria will use a mixed reality environment with pass-through technology to integrate the flight environment and the physical world.

Pretoria is designing the wildfire landscape with adjustable features such as fire size, wind-direction, rate of growth, intensity, and smoke behavior, which Bridger’s instructors will be able to manipulate for training purposes.

The multi-use capability with which Pretoria plans to imbue Bridger’s portable training simulators will allow pilots across the globe to interact virtually and train together. Such capability will enable individuals in separate locations to pilot and co-pilot the same aircraft virtually. Furthermore—as Pretoria’s simulation technology allows for the replication of actual fire landscapes and behaviors—Bridger’s pilots will be able to re-fly previous missions or train for extant wildfires.

By developing and implementing virtual teaching methods, Bridger and Pretoria Engineering stand ready to offer aerial-firefighting pilots a unique luxury of which they could not formerly avail themselves—the opportunity to screw-up and not perish.

FMI: www.bridgeraerospace.com