"I honestly believe this is all political," said Mark Timmons, whose company had eight air tankers on contract to the U.S. Forest Service. "They're not looking at ways to find solutions. They're not looking at individual operators. They've never even called us.
"The only agenda I can figure out right now is to have the private operators basically go away. They want us to go out of business."
Promises made to congressmen last week - that the Forest Service and Federal Aviation Administration would get the air tankers back in the air - were apparently hollow, said Kristen Schloemer, Neptune's president.
"This thing is a high-level bureaucratic hot potato," Schloemer said. "The FAA is sitting idle and the Forest Service doesn't want the program.
"And we are just supposed to shut up and take a financial settlement and forget about the people and communities that we care about."
At a meeting with employees Tuesday afternoon, Schloemer made a promise of her own: to keep fighting for Neptune and the air tanker industry.
"We are not going to give up," she said. "That's not in our vocabulary. It's not fair to our employees, to the communities that we serve or to the taxpayers."
Before the Forest Service canceled their contract earlier this month, Neptune's air tankers had been inspected and cleared for operation by the FAA and the Forest Service and judged flight-ready by pilots.
"And now they want us to talk about a settlement," Schloemer said. "That seems un-American."
Timmons and Schloemer will take their case to Washington, D.C., next week for a Senate hearing called by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.
In the meantime, they want to "turn up the heat" on Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth and Agriculture Undersecretary Mark Rey, Timmons said.
But they need the help of Missoula and other communities that depend on Neptune for firefighting support and - in Missoula's case - for tax dollars and goodwill, he said.
"The more people we can get involved, the better off we'll be," Timmons said. "This is a political fight, not a concern about safety."
When he canceled the air tanker contracts, Bosworth said the Forest Service had no way to guarantee their airworthiness and was worried about the safety of pilots, firefighters and the public.
As evidence, Bosworth pointed to a National Transportation Safety Board investigation of two air tanker crashes in 2002 - both by planes owned and operated by Hawkins and Powers of Greybull, Wyo.
In the report, the NTSB suggested a long list of changes needed to make air tankers more safe.
"But we have met or exceeded everything they asked for in that letter," Timmons said. "And the Forest Service knows that. So there has to be something else going on.
"We have complied with and exceeded everything, so you can't tell me it's about safety."
The safety issue now, he said, is that created by wildfires already burning in New Mexico - fires that could have been stopped before houses burned, had air tankers been on duty.
"The Forest Service is telling the public they have the assets to cover this fire season, but that's not what we're seeing in New Mexico," Timmons said. "Communities are on fire. Houses are being lost."
It would take years and years for the Forest Service to build its own fleet of air tankers, he said. Even then, there would be no flight crews.
The experience, Timmons said, is already on the payroll at private air tanker companies.
"Once this private industry is gone, the expertise is gone," he said. "You are basically losing 50 years of aerial firefighting experience."
Maybe it's time to turn wildland firefighting over to another federal agency, Timmons said. "I can guarantee you Homeland Security would be glad to take it over, and they would want air tankers as part of the equation."
"The Forest Service really doesn't have a plan here," he said. "If they do, they're not sharing it."
Reporter Sherry Devlin can be reached at 523-5268 or at sdevlin@missoulian.com
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