Northwest Aerospace News February | March 2018 Issue No. 1 | Page 36

A
mong the dead were
some high school class-
mates of company founder
and Prescott native, Jeremy
Young.
That motivated the company
to seek technology solutions
to aid in wildfire suppres-
sion, Wells said.
There are huge safety
advantages when incident
commanders on the ground
have access to TacAero’s
information from the sky.
For starters, being able to
use thermal imaging allows
fire bosses to see through
the smoke to what’s actually
happening on the ground.
Standard video cameras—
and human eyes—don’t
allow for that, and that’s a
problem, particularly in the
overnight and early morning
hours when the air is more
humid; the fires settle down
and the smoke hangs low
over the landscape.
Send a helicopter with a
spotter over a fire at first
light, and all you’re going
to see is a big gray sea
of smoke. But TacAero’s
thermal imaging streams
infra-red pictures to the fire
bosses in real time, allow-
ing them to update their
firefighting plans while their
teams are at breakfast.
The thermal imaging
technology also allows fire
bosses to track such things
as hot spots that are sending
hot embers up into the sky.
36
Eagle Creek Fire as seen
from the CubCrafters’
cockpit.
Graphical User Inter-
face(GUI) that controls
the camera system from
the ground or in the
cockpit - image on GUI
is of a helicopter dropping
water on the Eagle Creek Fire as seen
through thermal imaging technology.
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