That big-picture view is critical, taking a strategic approach to fighting the fire.īy contrast, for Nadia Rhodes, a ranger with ACT Parks and Conservation, 2019–20 was literally a baptism of fire, her first season as a supervisor. That ‘black summer’ was his seventh in the role. ![]() In the horrendous 2019–20 fire season, Perkins spent 350 hours in the air, fighting fires in Queensland and NSW. ![]() He has been working in aviation firefighting since 2007, completing his training as an air attack supervisor in 2012. His role is coordinator in an aircraft circling above bushfires, guiding aerial firefighting activity – water and retardant drops by helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft including large air tankers. ‘We used to have 3 months on and 9 months off but, in 2019–20, there was only a five-month gap in the season,’ says Ivan Perkins, an air attack supervisor who has been with the NSW Rural Fire Service for 17 years. Pick your analogy: a bushfire fighting air attack supervisor is either the civilian equivalent of a senior military officer in the heat of battle (not quite a general, because the air attack supervisor is on the battlefield rather than safely away from the front) or a ringmaster in a three-ring (or more) flying circus that performs its trapeze and highwire acts for ever-longer seasons. Coordinating firefighting aircraft is a complex juggling act of safety-critical decisions, played out in heat and smoke
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