Category: Aviation

Diving into burning canyons with Tanker 47

This story originally ran on January 16, 2025, in New York magazine.

Tanker 47 rears up as helicopter pilot Darren Davies settles it to hover over the Encino Reservoir, a half-mile-wide artificial lake perched on the shoulder of a hill overlooking the San Fernando Valley. He holds steady a dozen feet over the water as the flight mechanic in back, John Trivellin, lowers a 23-foot-long retractable snorkel into the reservoir.

“Tanker 47, we’re in the dip,” co-pilot Pablo Montero calls over the radio.

It’s 9.30 p.m. on Saturday, January 11, and the crew is on its third night working the Palisades fire, a Godzilla of a blaze that has already scorched more than 20,000 acres, killed five people, and annihilated more than 5,000 homes and other structures. The fire is less than 15 percent contained.

Davies’s infrared goggles turn the night into day, rendering the sprawling lights of the Valley below like a galaxy. In front sits a yellow rubber duck, a sort of mascot, jiggling atop the control panel from the vibrations of two massive sets of triple-rotor blades whirling overhead, each weighing 360 pounds. Radio frequencies for different fires are scrawled in black Sharpie on the inside of the windscreen in front of Montero, who handles most communications.

The Chinook is a beast, a 99-foot-long, 25-ton machine originally designed for humping troops and weapons around the battlefield, now repurposed for a different kind of war. It’s more than twice as big as the Black Hawk, its most famous cousin, and twice as long as a semi trailer when counting its 60-foot rotors. Inside Tanker 47’s cargo bay sits a 3,000-gallon tank, roughly equivalent to six hot tubs. While it’s not a vast amount in absolute terms, a helicopter can drop the water precisely, and all at once, which can halt the advance of even a large fire.

Within seconds, Davies can feel the aircraft grow heavier as the snorkel drinks from the reservoir and he throttles up the twin 5,000-horsepower turbine engines to compensate. In less than two minutes, the helicopter has taken on ten tons of water.

Aerial gawkers are getting in the way.

This article originally ran in New York magazine on January 10, 2025.

Aerial firefighting is already one of the most dangerous kinds of aviation there is. Pilots must maneuver heavy, sluggish planes over rough terrain at low altitude, often amid severe turbulence and poor visibility. Now aerial firefighters battling the Los Angeles wildfires are facing an additional danger: illegal drones. On Thursday a “Super Scooper” plane fighting the Palisade fire collided with a drone that tore a hole in its wing, forcing it to land and taking a powerful weapon out of the fight when it was urgently needed.

In the aftermath the FAA promised severe punishment for anyone caught flying drones in a way that interferes with firefighting, with penalties of up to 12 months in prison and $75,000 in fines. But the uncomfortable reality is that there is little that authorities can do to prevent illegal drone flights, as this incident and the recent New Jersey drone swarm panic both demonstrate.

Thursday’s accident occurred as firefighters struggled to contain a blaze that had consumed more than 17,000 acres, though it was spreading less aggressively thanks to a temporary lull in the winds. The aircraft, a twin-engine CL-415, is a Canadian-built amphibious aircraft designed specifically for aerial firefighting. It can skim along the surface of a lake or ocean and scoop up 1,600 gallons of water at a time, allowing it to carry out many sorties in a short interval since it doesn’t have to return to an airport to refill. A picture posted online by the L.A. County Fire Department showed a fist-size hole in the leading edge of the plane’s left wing. According to reporting by the WarZone, the incident led to the temporary grounding of all aircraft tasked to the Palisades fire.

This article originally ran in New York magazine on December 30, 2024.

The Jeju Air 737 crash in South Korea on Sunday that killed all but two of the people onboard was in many respects as baffling as it was tragic. Given the scant information currently available, it’s hard even to piece together a coherent picture of what happened. “There’s a lot more questions than there are answers,” says Jim Brauchle, an aviation attorney who flew transport planes in the U.S. Air Force and now investigates air crashes as part of his law practice.

What we do know is that the plane was inbound from Bangkok, Thailand, to Muan, South Korea, with 175 passengers and six crew members when it apparently flew into a flock of birds and sucked at least one into an engine as it came in to land. Video taken from the ground appears to show a puff of smoke coming from the plane’s right engine, signaling a compressor stall that would have caused the engine to lose some if not all of its thrust.

The flight crew declared an emergency and aborted the landing. Around this time, the plane stopped transmitting its speed and location data via an automatic system called ADS-B, which lets the plane be tracked on websites like FlightRadar24. At the moment of its final transmission, the plane was a mile and half from the approach end of the runway and about 500 feet above the surface.

This article originally ran in Sherwood News on July 29, 2024.

For fans of private-jet travel, there’s good news and there’s bad news. The good news first: the industry is thriving, as a wave of high-net-worth individuals have discovered the pleasures of being able to fly when you want, where you want, and how you want, no matter the price. Sales of private jets are booming, and charter companies are lavishing clients with add-ons that range from private chefs and in-flight wellness exercises to meetings with a Tibetan lama. 

The bad news: the entire industry faces imminent extinction thanks to regulatory pressure and political opposition amid global efforts to stem the climate crisis. “We have to push for a ban on private jets,” French climate activist Charlène Fleury told me. “This is the most polluting and the most unfair and the least necessary mode of transport.”

This article originally ran in New York magazine on June 11, 2024

If Donald Trump gets reelected in November, he’ll win a bonanza of benefits, including freedom from prison, the ability to jail Joe Biden, a $400,000 salary, and kinglike powers. He’ll also get a massive upgrade in the quality of his air travel, from his ’90s vintage 757 dubbed Trump Force One to the real Air Force One, a pair of heavily modified 747s worth billions.

To hear Trump tell it, that’s not much of an upgrade at all. He once told Rolling Stone that Air Force One is “a step down” from his 757 “in every way.”

But that’s pure delusion. Sure, Trump’s plane is big, and it has a shiny new paint job, but from a true private-jet aficionado’s point of view, those are about its only virtues. “It’s like if you wanted to brag about having a massive yacht, so you bought the Staten Island Ferry and converted it,” says a private-jet broker who prefers not to be identified. “That’s not something that people who really know yachts would find impressive.”

Trump Force One, you might say, is a poor man’s idea of a rich man’s plane — a big shiny bauble that behind the scenes is “a plane past its prime with decaying mechanics and exorbitant storage fees,” as CNN put it. Which raises the question: Why is a guy supposedly as rich as Trump is flying around in such a jalopy? According to Bloomberg, he’s worth $6.5 billion. People with this kind of wealth generally fly planes like the Gulfstream G650 or the Dassault Falcon 8X, the Porsches and Lamborghinis of the air. By comparison, Trump is flying a secondhand school bus.

It’s not really that complicated, though. To understand the crappiness of Trump’s plane, it helps to know a bit more about planes and Trump.