The aircraft over a Central Oregon fire, and what each one does

Central Oregon · last checked 29 July 2026

When a fire gets going out past Post or up the Ochocos, you can stand in a Prineville driveway and watch the whole air show go over: something small circling high, something big and low following the same track over and over, helicopters shuttling. It looks like chaos. It is one of the most tightly organised things happening in the county that day.

Here is what each aircraft is, in the order you usually notice them.

The one circling high and not doing anything

That is air attack — a small twin, usually orbiting a few thousand feet above everyone else, going round and round for hours. It is doing the most important flying over the fire. The person in the back is running the airspace: sequencing tankers and helicopters, deciding where the next load goes, and talking to the incident commander on the ground. Nothing drops until air attack says so.

Related, and easy to confuse: the lead plane. Also a small fast twin, but instead of orbiting it dives down and flies the drop run first, showing the tanker exactly the line to fly and the escape at the end of it. If you see a little plane make a low run and a big one follow it thirty seconds later on the same line, that is what happened. On complex ground the lead plane is the difference between a drop that lands where it helps and one that doesn't.

The big one dropping red

Air tankers drop retardant, not water. It is the red-pink stuff you see on fence lines and juniper for the rest of the summer. Two things about it that surprise people:

• It is not meant to hit the fire. It goes down ahead of the fire, on unburned fuel, to slow the front down and buy ground crews time to build line. A drop on the flames is usually a wasted load.
• It doesn't put anything out. People put fires out. Aviation supports them, and when the wind gets up enough it doesn't even do that — a drop from 150 feet in 30 mph wind drifts and shears apart before it reaches the ground.

Tankers are classified by how much they carry. This is the NWCG standard, which is what dispatch and every incident report you will ever read uses:

A SEAT — single engine air tanker, normally an Air Tractor 802 — is the little one. It carries a fraction of what a large tanker does, but it can operate off short strips close to the fire, turn around fast, and get in tight where a jet cannot. On a small fire caught early, a SEAT working with an engine crew is often the whole story.

A scooper is different again: a CL-415 or similar, which lands on a lake, skims water into its tanks on the run, and takes off again. No airport, no retardant plant, and it can cycle in minutes if there is water close enough. Whether one is useful on a given fire is a question of geography — it needs a lake long and clear enough to land on.

The helicopters

Helicopters carry water or foam in a belly tank or a bucket slung underneath, and unlike tankers they can hover, work in tighter terrain, refill from a pond or a portable dip tank, and drop with much more precision. Also classified by size:

Helicopters also carry people. Helitack crews are firefighters delivered by helicopter, and rappellers go down a rope where there is nowhere to land. If you see a helicopter hover in one spot for a couple of minutes with no water going anywhere, that may be what is happening.

The one you probably won't see, and the one you can't

Smokejumpers. Redmond has been a smokejumper base for decades — the Redmond Air Center, hosted by the Deschutes National Forest, sits at Roberts Field about two miles east of Redmond at 3,077 feet, and it is roughly half an hour from Bend, Sisters and Prineville. It is also an airtanker base with retardant storage and loading. So when you watch a tanker make the same run over the Ochocos four times in an afternoon, there is a decent chance it is going back to Redmond to reload each time. That is a genuinely unusual thing to have in your back yard.

The night infrared flight. Long after the last tanker shuts down, a high-flying aircraft mows the lawn over the fire with an infrared line scanner. That imagery gets interpreted overnight and turned into the heat perimeter the morning briefing works from — which is the real reason acreage figures often jump at breakfast without the fire having done anything dramatic. It was mapped properly. That is also why containment percentages sometimes fall overnight: a longer, better-measured perimeter means the same line covers less of it.

How to read them yourself on a tracker

Most of these aircraft broadcast ADS-B — position, altitude, speed, a callsign — and anyone can receive it. Three things are worth knowing.

Callsigns tell you the job

Fire aviation callsigns are unusually readable. TKR10 or TANKER 10 is air tanker 10; tanker numbers are assigned nationally, so the same number is the same aircraft wherever it works that season. You will also see LEAD, ATTACK, BIRDDOG, HELITACK, JUMPER, and agency prefixes like BLM, USFS and ODF. A registration on its own (N472NA) tells you nothing about the mission.

Squawk 1255 is a declaration, not a guess

Aircraft set a four-digit transponder code. 1200 is the generic "I am flying under visual rules, nobody is watching me" code. 1255 has been designated for firefighting aircraft since 1997. The FAA's Aeronautical Information Manual says an aircraft not in contact with air traffic control squawks 1255 in place of 1200 while en route to, from, or within a fire traffic area.

The bulletin that put the code into service is worth reading for what it restricts. It tells flight crews the code applies to aircraft "responding to and operating over fire suppression operations" and that it is not to be used while repositioning or on cross-country flights. It also notes that a pilot may select 1255 before contacting a control facility, but that once in contact, air traffic control keeps the discretion to assign a different code.

Which gives the nuance that matters: it only ever means yes. An aircraft flying from Georgia to Colorado to reach a fire is not supposed to squawk it; a ship shuttling water back and forth does. And a tanker working under ATC control may have been assigned a discrete code instead, so a tanker not squawking 1255 means nothing at all. Absence proves nothing. Presence is the crew telling you what they are doing.

Altitude and speed tell you the phase

A large tanker at 11,000 feet and 300 knots is repositioning. The same aircraft at 1,000 feet over the ground and 140 knots is on a run. A helicopter at 60 knots with a vertical rate near zero is working. That is most of what a tracker can honestly tell you.

What this looked like on 29 July 2026

Actual aircraft inside FireWatcher's 150-nautical-mile circle around Prineville, from the public ADS-B feed, the afternoon this page was written:

• TKR10 and TKR15, both BAe 146 large airtankers, one at 11,575 ft and 315 kt (repositioning), one at 5,900 ft and 218 kt. Both squawking 1255.
• SCPR263, a CL-415 scooper, 4,275 ft, 192 kt, squawking 1255.
• AHF7AC, a Bell 407, 5,800 ft, 85 kt, squawking 1255.
• An Air Tractor 802 at 675 ft and 55 kt — low and slow and exactly the profile of a working SEAT. It was not squawking 1255, and at 675 feet above sea level it was nowhere near the Central Oregon fires; almost certainly an ag plane spraying a field in the Willamette Valley, well inside the circle.

That last one is the honest lesson of this whole page, so I left it in.

Why FireWatcher hedges on this, and how it decides

The dashboard flags aircraft as likely fire-related, and it says right on the page that this is an inferred hint and not a fact. That is not modesty — it is a real limitation. Here is exactly how it works, so you can judge the output:

• A fire-style callsign, or a 1255 squawk, counts as identity evidence — this aircraft is what it says it is.
• An airframe that is nearly always a fire or aerial-work aircraft counts too. An airframe that can be a tanker but is far more often an airliner or an air ambulance (a 737, a C-130, a UH-60, an EC-135) counts for less, and only at low altitude.
• Proximity to a known fire, plus flying low and slow, adds weight — but never enough on its own.
• Scheduled airline and cargo callsigns are vetoed outright. Without that, every Southwest 737 descending into Redmond tripped the low-and-slow and proximity tests at once.

Things it cannot do: see aircraft that are not broadcasting ADS-B or are outside receiver coverage in this terrain, tell you which fire an aircraft is assigned to, or distinguish a tanker on a drop from a tanker overflying on its way somewhere else. Position data is not an assignment. If you want to know what aviation is working an incident, the incident's own updates on Central Oregon Fire Info or InciWeb are the source.

Two questions everybody asks

Why did they stop flying?

Most likely: dark. Aerial firefighting is largely a daylight business, and there are hard cut-off times before sunset. Otherwise: wind too strong for a drop to be useful or safe, smoke thick enough that nobody can see the target, aircraft timed out on duty limits, or the load is doing more good on a different fire. Aviation gets prioritised across the whole region, and a fire that has a line around it loses air support to one that doesn't — which is usually good news.

Can I fly my drone to see the fire?

No, and this one is worth being blunt about. Wildfires get a temporary flight restriction, and inside it nobody flies except the aircraft on the incident. When an unauthorised drone shows up, the aircraft come out of the air until the airspace is confirmed clear — the Forest Service runs a standing campaign on exactly this, called If You Fly, We Can't. That is potentially hours of no retardant, no water, no air attack, over somebody's house. There are also serious civil and criminal penalties. If you want to see the fire, the map and the ALERTWest camera views on it are free and legal.

Sources

• NWCG Aircraft (PMS 200) — the airtanker and helicopter type tables quoted above.
• FAA Aeronautical Information Manual, paragraph 4-1-20 (Transponder and ADS-B Out Operation) — the 1255 code. The repositioning restriction, the flight-crew briefing requirement and ATC's discretion to reassign are from DOI OAS Information Bulletin 97-5, 23 July 1997 (PDF).
• USFS — Redmond smokejumpers, for the Redmond Air Center location, elevation and host forest.
• NIFC Infrared Branch and USFS National Infrared Operations (NIROPS), for the overnight mapping flights.
• USFS — If You Fly, We Can't, and the FAA's temporary flight restriction list.
• adsb.lol (ODbL 1.0) — the community ADS-B feed the aircraft observations above came from. Aircraft classification is FireWatcher's own inference layer and is not part of, or endorsed by, adsb.lol.

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