I’ve been working as a forest firefighter for BC wildfire for years and years, & in my time fighting wildfires, I’ve seen more helicopters than I have planes involved in direct attack, equipment and crew moves, recon flights and back burns using a heli torch or dragon eggs, which are dropped from helicopters, than I have planes.
While I don’t discredit the use of planes in wildfire, they’re incredibly useful, are vital to wildfire suppression and are a valuable resource within the industry, helicopters also play a vital role within the industry. They long line equipment and supplies to us on the fire lines, pick us up and drop off us in locations we can’t get to by vehicle or foot, they drop water and retardant using either buckets or belly tanks. Our rapple attack crew acts as medical crew as well during wildfires, so they’re also med-evac units as well.
It may just be that BC Wildfire prefers to use helicopters or just doesn’t have access to the fleet that American wildfire crews are able to use, but it would be a nice addition.
Seeing helicopters incorporated into the wildfires would be more realistic and open up more doors in the career path. Bucketing is an incredibly difficult and hard skill to learn and master. The sikorsky sky crane is featured and we use that quite frequently to drop retardant/water on wildfires.
I 100% agree on this!!
Helicopters must be as important as planes in the wildfire firefighting career.
In my region we also see more helis than planes, so I was quite shocked by not seeing them as a main thing at firefighting in the new sim.
Please, consider!
I’ve been searching for answers on whether we’ll be allowed to fight fire with helicopters, and everything I’ve seen so far in the official communications from Microsoft is suggesting that aerial firefighting will be limited to fixed-wing aircraft only.
I’m marginally involved in wildland firefighting just to your South in the NW corner of the U.S., and I couldn’t agree with you more about the role that helicopters play on wildfires. In my neck of the woods, it’s almost a guarantee that you will have at least one if not multiple helicopters working a fire before the first fixed-wing aircraft are even mobilized to an incident, filling one or more of the many roles you listed.
I’m honestly a little dumbfounded that helicopter aerial firefighting hasn’t been included from the start. They have heli’s that are well-known for aerial firefighting in the aircraft list (S-64 Aircrane is even pictured rigged for firefighting), as well as marketplace helicopters that have firefighting attachments (Taog’s Hangar helis in particular, and I’m hoping the non-marketplace Delta Simulations Blackhawk will include a bambi bucket/longline once updated for 2024). They have the career path/activity in the sim, just limited to fixed-wing. They have longline work/heli construction for helicopters and the water system for the firefighting/crop-dusting planes, so the physics/gameplay parts are surely already in place. I’m no game developer, but as a gamer and helicopter geek I just don’t understand why they would choose not to include a technically deep, diverse, challenging and well-known sector of commercial helicoptering when the groundwork is seemingly already laid.
I’m crossing my fingers that I’m wrong about my interpretation of what I’ve seen so far, or that at least aerial firefighting will be opened up to helicopters shortly after release. I could live with buying a 3rd party developer add-on to allow helicopters to participate in aerial firefighting, but I strongly believe it should be a native part of the career mode. After working on a fire several years ago and watching contract Blackhawks fly bambi buckets in on the longline, knocking down spot fires with speed and precision for ground crews to mop-up, I’ve been looking for a detailed way to simulate that experience in MSFS. It’s the thing I’ve been most excited about since learning about MSFS 2024, and while I know I’ll have a lot of fun with the other careers both helicopter and fixed-wing, I’d be really disappointed if helicopter firefighting goes un-implemented.
Thanks again for bringing visibility to this topic!
If it’s not planned on release it seems to follow later (otherwise a default bambi bucket preset would not make much sense, just like the firefighting equipment on the Skycrane would also not make much sense…)
The SDK however does currently not cover aerial firefighting ops for rotorcraft - that doesn’t ultimately mean these are not in place as the aircraft configuration itself may not be different from a default cargo helicopter variant which means that a helicopter for cargo operations (which automatically means sling load) may be available for fire fighting type missions. This is however speculative.
I’m 100% positive they know this and it will eventually come. But, yes, I voted for it. Jorg and Seb and Martial and Davide have all said this is just the start…
Helicopters play an important role in firefighting. Whether it’s fighting small fires or large forest fires. Firefighting missions are an integral part of helicopter missions. The most common tool in helicopter firefighting is the Bambi Bucket.
