Buffalo seeks next generation of pilots to fight wildfires

“I watch a lot of pilots in the North fly their floatplanes, fly other airplanes, and they would fit into a job like this very well.”

Joe McBryan wants to turn northern pilots into the next generation of people fighting wildfires from the air, and now he has the aircraft to do it.

Buffalo Airways – the NWT-based airline that “Buffalo Joe” has called home for decades – now has a two-seat training version of the Air Tractor AT-802, or Fire Boss, an aircraft used to tackle wildfires that has become a familiar sight over the territory’s skies in recent years. A second plane is on the way.

McBryan says the new aircraft and a simulator tucked away in an upstairs room allow Buffalo to replicate training that could previously only be acquired in Miami or Spain.

He’s ready for pilots to sign up.

“I’m aiming this at northern pilots that are up here now, flying through Yellowknife or through the Mackenzie Valley, through the Beaufort Delta and the Sahtu, to see if any of them are interested in taking on specialized flying,” he said.

“A lot of pilots just want to fly an airplane but some of them have a further interest. They may be interested in the wildlife aspect of fires – that’s where I came in. That’s why I got the name Buffalo Joe, because we were protecting buffalo from fires. And so they may have an interest in environment, or they might have an interest in forestation.”

A pilot starting afresh with an AT-802 is expected to need five hours on the simulator, 10 hours in the training aircraft and about 40 hours of ground school.

Buffalo expects to launch its next round of training early in 2025.

When people sit in the simulator – a shell of an AT-802 cockpit mounted in front of a big screen in an otherwise nondescript back office – they can take on a library of scenarios that draws on everything NWT pilots have faced in the territory’s recent severe fire seasons.

“They go through more emergencies than hopefully they’ll ever have in their lifetime,” said Daren Piggott, who builds and maintains the simulators Buffalo uses.

Piggott was formerly a flight instructor and charter pilot who had a computer business and, as a hobby, constructed a Boeing 737 simulator in his basement. When a former Buffalo employee put him in touch with McBryan, he was soon in Yellowknife helping the airline to develop simulators of its own.

“Experienced pilots come in every year with thousands of hours on this aircraft, and I’ve been listening to them say, ‘OK, this is what it’s like in the real plane.’ When they give me that feedback, I can go into the simulator and reprogram it,” Piggott said.

“I rely on their feedback. When they go, ‘Wow, that was really close,’ we know we’re getting close.”

“What you can do,” said McBryan, “is put a camera in the airplane, film the fire that you’re working, then come back and re-fly it here to see if you can perfect it a little better with your wind drift and your angles.”

The simulator allows the airline to more readily evaluate pilots, he added.

“Here, you can test pilots and see if they have the aptitude in the hands and feet – because it’s a hands and feet airplane.”

More than 50 people at Buffalo Airways have some involvement in fighting wildfires each summer, McBryan said. The airline also trains mechanics who work on firefighting aircraft.

When a bad fire season hits, the NWT can draw on firefighting aircraft from elsewhere – for example, McBryan estimates there are just over a dozen AT-802s available from Alberta and British Columbia – but he wants to train northern pilots because they already know the terrain.

“The northern pilots that we have, I’ve seen them all through the North, worked with them all through the North. They’re very apt and very well-versed on water flying. They’re like sailors: they can read the water, they can read the wind and read the waves or the swells,” McBryan said.

“Right now, we import a lot of pilots when we could be training our local pilots who have local knowledge of the terrain, the weather, the environment, what our water is like. A floatplane pilot around here, especially, understands the different lakes and depths, and so that’s what we’re looking at.”

McBryan expects to have two of the trainer aircraft by January. He said Buffalo can take the aircraft to Hay River, Fort Smith, Fort McMurray and beyond to offer a firefighting flight school wherever it is needed.

“To send everybody to Miami to train costs a lot of money that left the Territories. They come back and they’re trained, but they’re not trained in our environment. They’re not trained in our fire behaviour in the Northwest Territories,” he said.

“They’re not trained in the boreal forest. They’re trained in the alligators and swamps in Miami.”

Conversely, McBryan said, pilots who train in the North can be exported to the rest of the world to help tackle fires anywhere.

He said more than 1,000 AT-802s are in operation throughout the Americas, Europe and Asia – and while he may prefer northern pilots for their knowledge of the NWT’s land and water, those skills will work anywhere.

“If you’re trained here, on a seasonal basis you have the opportunity to work around the world for the rest of the year and then come back here in the spring,” he said.

“We have pilots that are reaching the age of almost retirement, but I want to capture their background and their experience and pass it on to the new generation of pilots I want to train.”

Piggott is now building a second simulator for the Canadair CL-215, a larger firefighting aircraft.

His desk at Buffalo is littered with components stripped from old aircraft, into which he’ll carefully insert digital dials and gauges that he can control from a computer, allowing him to replicate the experience of sitting in a CL-215 cockpit.

“When it’s done, we’ll have a lot of the original aircraft parts supplemented with something the technology can fit in,” he said. A Boeing 737 simulator is also on the way.

McBryan said the growing Buffalo School of Aviation is becoming “sort-of our own university out here.”

With pride, he describes how firefighting aircraft helped Hay River as a wildfire drew near in 2023, the territory’s worst fire season on record.

He recalls aircraft helping to “save the town twice and save the hospital three times,” and he puts that down to “the efficiency of the airplane – and the training of the crews.”