How aerial firefighters battle blazes from the skies
An Erickson Aero Tanker aircraft, left, dropping fire retardant. (Shelby Snow /)The most dramatic way to fight a fire is from the sky.An air tanker may fly about 150 feet off the ground at 161 miles per hour and can paint up to a mile-long line of retardant on the ground. A big helicopter could dump as much as 2,000 gallons of water to try to save a house. And smokejumpers fling themselves from airplanes 3,000 feet above their landing area below to snuff out a small fire in a remote area before it gets bigger.Right now, California is home to two historically enormous blazes: the SCU and LNU Lightning Complex fires. The state is using aircraft to combat the two huge conflagrations. “They keep swapping positions for the second- and third-largest wildfires in our state history, unfortunately,” Brice Bennett, a spokesperson for CalFire, told Popular Science earlier this week....