ERDA, Utah — As wildfire season continues in Utah, aircraft are being utilized to help fight fires from the air.
At the Tooele Valley Airport in Erda, you will find a couple of single-engine air tankers — also known as SEATs — parked near the runway.
"These are firefighting airplanes. They can carry up to 800 gallons of fire retardant with them," said Joshua Archibald, the unit aviation manager with the Bureau of Land Management's West Desert District. "So what they're able to do is slow the fire down and give firefighters more time to respond to it."
Archibald says this aircraft can cover in 30 minutes what it takes a ground-based vehicle three hours to do.
He says the SEATs provided assistance on recent fires, like the Sandhurst Fire near Ensign Peak and the Antelope Island State Park fire last week.
"Our planes were able to respond to that rapidly and keep the fire from encroaching on the visitor center," said Archibald.
Archibald told FOX 13 News on Wednesday that the largest year they've had was in 2018, when they delivered more than 500,000 gallons of retardant during firefighting efforts.
"So far this year, we've responded to 38 separate fires and have delivered over 60,000 gallons of retardant," said Archibald.
He says here in the Great Basin, there are 18 single-engine air tankers taking to the sky to assist on wildfires. That includes aircraft in Tooele, Cedar City, and Pocatello, Idaho.
"[The pilots] are going low and slow and they're taking a lot of risks and they're doing that for public safety. I consider them heroes," said Archibald.
Dave Bright has been flying for 40 years. Twenty of those years, Bright says, have been in the cockpit of an air tanker.
"I kind of wanted to do this since I was a kid," he said.
Bright told FOX 13 News he has been to several fires this year, including the Dikker Hill, Murdoch Hollow and Antelope Island fires.
"We're just here to help, help the guys on the ground," said Bright.
Both Archibald and Bright wanted to remind the public to not fly drones in the area of a fire these crews are responding to. They say that can cause the response to a fire to be postponed until that drone is out of the fire traffic area.
You can find more information about that on the Utah Wildfire Info website.
