Autonomy and Bambi bucket
On October 29, the American companies Sikorsky (a subsidiary of Lockheed Martin) and Rain demonstrated for the very first time the wildfire fighting capabilities of the UH-60 Black Hawk autonomous medium transport helicopter. The information was made public in a press release published on November 11. He specifies that a demonstration was carried out with the autonomous Black Hawk equipped with a bambi bucket. For the occasion, representatives of entities fighting directly or indirectly against forest fires were present: the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the Los Angeles County Fire Department (LACoFD) and Orange County Fire Authority (OCFA). The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) were also represented, in addition to other entities or potential investors.
Three tests were carried out, with a cumulative flight duration of 30 minutes. For safety reasons, a pilot was present on board the helicopter but he never had to intervene during the 30 minutes of demonstration. Each time, on orders from the control tablet, the Black Hawk took off, searched for the fire and extinguished it using the water present in the bambi bucket. For the occasion, the fire was real but small: a ring 30.5 centimeters in diameter fueled with propane (gas) and ignited by a spark, all creating flames of 7.6 to 15, 2 centimeters. The system developed by Rain and integrated into the Black Hawk made it possible to take the wind into account to best adjust the helicopter's flight in order to offer an effective drop solution.
An important need
The presence of LACoFD and OCFA is not a coincidence: thousands of firefighters are sometimes mobilized in California to fight a single fire. This region also quite often sees the appearance of megafires, the burned area of which is greater than 10,000 hectares: Mosquito Fire (134,358 hectares) between September 6 and October 22, 2022, Smith River Complex Fire (38,488 ha ) between August 15 and November 17, 2023 and more recently, Park Fire (173,854 ha) between July 24 and September 26, 2024… to name only the most important fires of the last three years! Indeed, other fires and megafires also had to be extinguished at the same time as the megafires previously listed.
Air assets are therefore strategic, if not essential: helicopters, twin-engine planes but also C-130H Hercules and even the rental of DC-10s modified and put into service by the company 10 Tanker Air Carrier (video below) . The arrival of autonomous systems would represent, as explained by Maxwell Brodie, CEO of Rain, a capacity gain with, for example, night flight capacity or even the possibility of flight in a smoky area, something currently impossible:
“Wildfires cost the United States more than $390 billion annually, and multiple risk factors are expected to increase by up to 30% by 2030. We look forward to demonstrating to lawmakers how autonomous devices can prevent wildfires to break up or continue to fly at night and in areas of turbulence and smoky areas where aircraft piloted by a crew would not venture.“
DARPA?
The presence of DARPA is explained above all by the autonomy of this Black Hawk. On February 5, 2022, a UH-60A Black Hawk (N60-OPV) medium transport helicopter flew fully autonomously for the first time*. This new helicopter-borne solution was made possible by the development and integration of the Matrix system from Sikorsky (a subsidiary of Lockheed Martin). Transport tests under sling or even simulated personnel in the cabin had also been carried out successfully on November 2, 2022.
The development of this capability will allow the American Armed Forces to have autonomous helicopter-borne logistics support solutions: with one click on a tablet, several autonomous aerial systems will be able to transport loads to a desired area, in complete autonomy*. The devices would then take into account the different known threats in order to choose the best flight path towards the area in question, also integrating the terrain, the different obstacles, etc.
In the context of the fight against forest fires, there is no need to specify the advantage that a wing of autonomous medium helicopters with firefighting capabilities would represent, and which, at the first alert and “in one click”, would direct – day and night – towards an American megafire in order to support the resources deployed on the ground. The video below shows a test carried out in December 2023. It demonstrates the filling capacity of the bambi bucket, the visual detection of the fire by the helicopter and finally, the release of the carried water, all in complete autonomy*.
*Autonomous drones are never completely autonomous, the human being must always remain in the decision-making loop: an order must always be issued by a human being and certain decisions require authorization from a human operator. But the approaches, flight management, accumulation of information available on a cloud, etc. are tasks managed by the system's artificial intelligence.
