2010 Whitepaper, draft9: Fire Attack IR+GIS (FAIRGIS) Comments to mszaller@yahoo.com

Articles published:

- Widlfire Magazine: High Flying Intel

- DeLorme Newsletter: XMap at work ni Airborne Wildfire Management

 

 

Detailed situational awareness and names can quickly earn you respect as a local.  Clam-shell Laptops should not be used, but rather Tablet PCs.  Use either DeLorme Topo USA or DeLorme XMap 7 Pro.  They are easy to use and connect to Bluetooth wireless or USB wired GPS for moving-map.

 

 

GIS teams on project fires normally produce data that is wonderful to us in the air.  Fire lines, hot spots, burn out, dozer & hand lines, division breaks, drop points, dip sites and more as overlays are all oriented on the moving topos with instant situational awareness and ability to zoom in - out.  This will allow you to do some things previously not possible, in addition to the obvious of quickly finding everything.  DeLorme XMap imports ESRI .shp files directly one by one.  DeLorme Topo and Maptech require the GIS team to first create special .gpx files. 

 

 

On any of the Topo packages the DRAW function will allow an ATGS to draw fire perimeters that can be transmitted to the ground, or handed off once back on the ground.  A right click will tell you the acreage. Fire perimeters can be saved as .kml fires so that anyone with Google Earth installed will see the perimeter

 

 

 

 

Latitude, who makes many of the AFF (Automated Flight Following) boxes, already installed in fire aircraft, has written a Windows utility to transfer fire maps from the cockpit to the ground.  Maps transmits as Google Earth attachments through email to a group list.  Perimeter maps can transmit within a minute directly to anyone or everyone on the IC team, GIS and dispatch.  Even frontline firefighters can receive them on an iPhone or SmartPhone running Google Earth.

 

 

 

Infrared: Long heralded as breakthrough technology for fire fighting, good IR cameras have become so inexpensive that here is no reason not to install one on every Air Attack plane.  Installation & FAA certification are also easy, and so is usage.  Fixed mounted side looking infrared (SLIR) sees through the smoke and dark. SLIR requires no training or 3rd person board.  It is so easy that on the first flight both the Air Attack and pilot will become completely functional.

 

 

 

 

HD video (1920x1080) will capture full motion continuously.  The movies are so hi-res, that you can "snapshot" any frame and it becomes a standalone hi-res 2 megapixel photo.  Movies can be used for debriefing, training, incident command and mapping out the whole fire. Starting at around $500 you can point it out the window using a suction mount.

 

 This content is all provided as a free service by the community of aerial fire fighters.  Questions or discussion should be posted to AerialFireTech Discussion Group .  We might be out flying, especially during fire season, so participants will get back to as soon as possible.

 

Updated April 15, 2010

 

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