by rob chaney
photos by tom bauer

Soaring along the jagged ridge of the Ninemile Divide, an automated voice announced the words most pilots dread to hear: “Pull up! Terrain!”

Photo: Neptune Aviation’s BAe-146 retardant jet makes a test water drop in 2010.  Neptune hopes to make the jet its next generation of firefighting airplane.

“We need to get that fixed,” Neptune Aviation lead pilot Pete Bell says as he aims Tanker 40 at a make-believe forest fire “burning” near the ridge top. Flying close to terrain is exactly what the BAe-146 jet under his control is supposed to do.

As they zoom toward Cha-paa-qn Peak, Bell and co-pilot Loren Crea maintain constant chatter in the cockpit. They call out their drop spot and choose the escape route they will take afterward – this time a winding ravine down toward the Clark Fork River. They agree on the amount of wing flap to deploy before the jet drops 3,000 gallons of red foam from its belly. They also agree to get a mechanic to fix the faulty terrain warning system.

The cockpit atmosphere is much more relaxed than the typical Neptune retardant bomber mission. For the past 38 years, Bell has been flying aerial tankers. Thirteen of those have been in Neptune Aviation’s workhorse P2V bomber – a 1950s-era submarine hunter modernized to fight forest fires.

“The P2V is way more work than this,” Bell said as he banked left down the ravine. “It’s going to revolutionize our job.”

The BAe’s four jet engines provide only part of the thrust pushing Missoula-based Neptune Aviation to a new level of business. The 20-year-old company banks on it as the next generation in aerial firefighting. But years of nursing along an aging fleet of P2Vs has also inspired Neptune to put more than just retardant bombing under its wings.

Neptune employees wash one of the company’s P2V retardant tankers.  The company plans to keep maintaining and flying the World War II-era planes for the foreseeable future.

In September, Neptune’s BAe-146 won an interim contract to fight fire for the U.S. Forest Service and was immediately dispatched to Longview, Texas. A week later, the governor of Texas had photos on his Facebook page of Tanker 40 laying a red strip through the trees.

“This is the first time a new large air tanker has been brought on in a very long time, at least since the early ’80s” said Neptune President Dan Snyder. “They’ve had to dust off the whole process of certifying a new plane.”

“Pull Up! Terrain!” warnings have rattled the aerial firefighting industry for a decade. In 2002, there were 44 large air tankers flying forest fires in the United States.

That summer, a C-130A lost its wings over a California fire, and a PB4Y-2 broke apart in mid-flight. Five crew members died. Both planes were operated by Hawkins and Powers of Greybull, Wyo.

Two years later, the Forest Service grounded its whole fleet of large air tankers, or LATs, Neptune began a four-year struggle to prove its P2Vs were airworthy. It finally did so and won a five-year contract from the Forest Service in 2008.

“Since then, there’ve been five or six studies commissioned by the Forest Service on the future of LATs and how to rebuild the fleet,” said Bill Gabbret, a retired wildland fire manager who monitors aerial firefighting developments on his Wildfire Today website. “They haven’t made a decision how to do anything about it.”

About the same time the Hawkins and Powers bombers crashed, Neptune was hunting for a next-generation airplane. It went through at least six models before settling on the BAe-146, a British-built jet designed for freight hauling and commercial travel.

“It has a lot of potential,” Gabbret said of Neptune’s choice. “BAe’s are newer than the World War II-era P2Vs. You’re talking 15 years old vs. 50 or 60 years old. Maybe it is the answer.”

Neptune Aviation pilots Peter Bell, left, and Loren Crea fly the company’s BAe-146 jet-powered large air tanker over the Missoula Valley during a test water drop in 2011.

Aerial firefighting has many siblings but no true mother. Many of its first pilots and planes came from the world of farm crop-dusting. They flew low, took risks and dumped heavy liquid loads in defined lines. The ground rarely fought back.

Military pilots would seem a natural ancestor, but again, the challenges differ. Yes, a bomber pilot drops heavy loads on target or strafes in lines, and must evade anti-aircraft fire. But even heat-seeking missiles don’t present the same threat as a landscape convulsed by billowing heat waves, spiraling winds and smoke-obscured mountain walls.

And Neptune pilots consider themselves firefighters first, aviators second.

“People tend to default back to what they know,” Snyder said. “All the old planes are old military aircraft that dropped bombs. Now we’re taking non-warplanes and teaching them to drop retardant. We have to educate the government on why it works the way it does.”

Forest Service national fire aviation director Tom Harbour said dozens of companies have offered candidate airplanes for firefighting work. Neptune’s just been the first to take Forest Service criteria and put a plane in service.

“We’re looking all around to see what aircraft there are out there,” Harbour said. “We’re not doing any research in particular aircraft (within the Forest Service) but we’re interested in all designs. There are lots out there, old, new, big and little.

“In the case of the BAe, we’ve been in close coordination with Neptune,” Harbour continued. “We said ‘Here are the attributes we’re looking for.’ Then Neptune put their own energy and money into developing the platform.”

While the Forest Service remains the biggest player in the firefighting field, several others have a say as well. The U.S. Bureau of Land Management and National Park Service have their own considerations, as does every state with wildland territory. California, in fact, has its own firefighting air force, mostly single-seat and smaller multi-engine tankers.

Neptune examined six other planes before settling on the BAe-146 as its best bet. It bought Tanker 40 from its leasing partner, Canada-based Tronos, in 2010. Then the testing began.
“The flying was the tip of the iceberg,” Snyder said. The plane spent about 45 hours in the air, but much more than that getting poked, prodded and reviewed on the ground.
“The BAe is a very responsive airplane,” Snyder said. “It can get into places a bigger plane can’t. It’s not like the DC-10 or the 747 (which have been used as air tankers in some areas).”

The BAe will deliver between 3,000 and 5,000 gallons of retardant, compared to the P2V’s 2,000- to 3,000-gallon payload. And simply being a contemporary jet makes a huge difference. The P2V can’t fly on a rainy October day – it risks icing its wings. The BAe has modern deicing capabilities, as well as weather radar.

Its cockpit is pressurized and climate-controlled. It has hydraulic-assisted controls. The P2V required lots of muscle to move the flaps and fins. All those things cut down on pilot fatigue, which is a common cause of flying accidents.

“There’s much more automation,” pilot Bell said. “We have an autopilot we use a lot to get from job to job.”

A Neptune P2V drops retardant on a fire on Mount Jumbo in Missoula in 2000.

Its extra speed and range could allow the Forest Service to cut back on the number of strategic air bases where it stages fire bombers. Those bases try to be within an hour’s flight of any dispatched fire. The BAe can hop between bases in Texas and Florida in an hour and a half if the need arises.

“The mission of the pilot is still the same; it’s just a new tool,” Snyder said. “It’s giving the firefighters a new fire truck.”

“We’re going to be putting more mud on the ground quicker and more reasonably priced because we can do it more efficiently,” Neptune Chief Executive Officer Kristen Nicholarsen said.

The wartime rumble of P2V rotary engines won’t leave the Missoula skies soon. Neptune still has 10 of them in active duty. And it’s building an 11th purely for training purposes.

But when the Forest Service grounded all heavy tankers in 2004, it prompted Neptune to rethink its future.

“It brought to the forefront how one event can really impact us,” Snyder said. “We served one customer and we work well at it. But we needed to diversify our business.”

Neptune employees 168 people in its core Missoula work force, plus another 30 or 40 contractors brought on for specific tasks. Most of them live and work in Missoula, although pilots are allowed to live anywhere in the country.

Snyder’s Missoula office sits two doors and a hallway away from the shop floor. The whine of grinders and rattle of hammer drills penetrates and never seems to stop.

Neptune has expanded its metals machining capabilities because it had to make P2V replacement parts from scratch – sometimes milling them out of 85-pound blocks of steel.

“We have hundreds of years of accumulated experience with rotary engines,” Snyder said. “We’re looking at the warbird community.”

In other words, Neptune wants to put its make-it-yourself mechanics at the service of other vintage plane owners who have an equally tough time keeping their planes in the sky. That ranges from air-show veterans who keep old B-17 and B-25 bombers flying, to Alaskan bush pilots who remain faithful to rotary engines for their dependability in tough conditions.

One of the requirements to get back in the Forest Service firefighting business was proving the planes’ parts wouldn’t succumb to metal fatigue. At the time, nobody agreed on how to test for that. Neptune developed many of the techniques the Forest Service adopted for its reviews.

“We became the expert in fatigue issues,” said Greg Jones, Neptune’s project director. “That will work to our advantage on different levels.”

During the nearly year-round fire season, Neptune’s P2Vs travel to wherever the fire is. And because they are so maintenance-heavy, Neptune kept another small jet to deliver parts or mechanics as needed.

That sparked an idea to expand into the air charter business. The company’s King-100 turboprop plane can haul eight people, and was getting plenty of work delivering Neptune crews. So when a Falcon 50 EX jet came on the market, the company grabbed it.

The Falcon only holds one more person than the King-100, but it does so in much more executive style. And faster.

While charter air service has never been cheap, it makes more and more sense in places like Montana, Snyder said. For example, a round-trip business visit from Missoula to Billings requires three days by car, or a connecting flight through Denver by commercial airline. Neptune’s charter planes can take a whole business team round-trip in an afternoon.

It can also fly them across the country or across the ocean. Nicholarsen said the market for executive travel remains strong, especially for companies that need the speed but don’t want to own their own jet anymore.

Motorists driving Broadway or Interstate 90 could occasionally catch a glimpse of Neptune’s “boneyard” – a five-acre lot east of its main hanger where it kept cannibalized P2Vs and other planes once considered candidate fire bombers.

“We want to become a maintenance repair organization,” Snyder said. “And to do that, we need more infrastructure. The Missoula airport also needs more hangar space.”

So over the next five years, Neptune plans on developing a hangar and shop facility in its old salvage yard big enough to house Boeing 737 jets and similar-sized aircraft. Knowing that commercial airlines typically contract out their routine maintenance chores, Neptune wants to develop a team of mechanics qualified to work on all the planes that frequent Missoula International Airport.

International is another key idea. Despite their antiquity, Neptune’s P2Vs faced a daunting barrier to fighting fires in other countries like Australia or Russia. The U.S. government prohibits most military aircraft from operating overseas. The BAe’s civilian upbringing neutralizes that problem.

“It’s a global platform,” said Jones. “And that’s a whole new market we’re starting to look at.”

At the start of the 21st century, Neptune Aviation was essentially a two-job company. It fought forest fire with P2Vs and maintained them. It had 50 employees and six planes.

Today, the pie chart has many more slices. P2Vs and maintenance share space with the BAe-146, charter flights, outside aircraft maintenance and other expansion projects. The fire-bomber fleet is up to 10, plus the two charter planes, and the work force has more than tripled.

“We’re a completely different company from three years ago,” CEO Nicholarsen said. “And we’re unrecognizable from 20 years ago. We’re driving the change within the aviation industry.”

Rob Chaney is a reporter for the Missoulian. He can be reached at (406) 523-5382 or by email at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .