The 2026 fire season was hard on the people who fly. In late June, a spotter aircraft went down on a fire near Fort Simpson in Canada's Northwest Territories, and all three people aboard died. On July 12, the pilot of an aircraft assigned to Colorado's Gold Mountain Fire was killed when the plane went into Silver Jack Reservoir. On August 7, a Sikorsky S-64 Skycrane on contract with the U.S. Forest Service crashed near Utah's Widemouth 2 Fire, killing both pilots.
Investigators will decide what happened in each case. But one fact already sits under all of them. Every aircraft that works a wildfire flies into air that no one has fully measured, shaped by a heat source that changes by the minute.
You cannot make flight safe in air you have never measured. That is not a new idea. It is the oldest idea in aviation safety.
Fire Makes Its Own Weather
A wildfire is not just something burning on the ground. It is an engine that heats the air above it and throws that air upward, hard. Air rushes in from the sides to replace it. The result can be a storm system the fire builds for itself.
Researchers flying radar near the 2016 Pioneer Fire in Idaho measured updrafts up to 130 mph and downdrafts reaching 65 mph. One scientist aboard was injured when their small plane was thrown upward by the plume. The study found that fire-driven updrafts can rival those inside tornado-producing supercell thunderstorms, and flagged them as a previously undocumented aviation hazard.
Worse, pilots often cannot see this air coming. Fire-driven turbulence does not always show up on aircraft weather radar, because the plume does not carry the water that radar is built to detect. Australia's aviation safety regulator puts it plainly: turbulence near fire clouds can behave like clear air turbulence.
Low and close to the flames, the danger takes other forms. In 2015, a Fire Boss air tanker working a fire near Cold Lake, Alberta, was dropping water and foam from 150 to 200 feet when it flew into a fire whirl, a tornado-like column of spinning air generated by the fire itself. The aircraft pitched up, rolled, and hit the ground. Canada's Transportation Safety Board found that at that altitude, recovery was improbable.
Aviation Is One of the Deadliest Jobs on the Fire
This is not a small corner of the wildfire problem. A federal NIOSH study of wildland firefighter deaths from 2000 to 2013 found that 78 of 298 deaths, about 26 percent, were tied to aviation. Pilots, copilots, and flight engineers made up 68 percent of those losses. An earlier Forest Service review called aircraft accidents the leading cause of deaths during wildland fire operations.
Aircrews have always accepted risk to protect the crews on the ground. The least that can be done in return is to give them the best possible picture of the air they are flying into.
Science Has Measured the Plume. Aviation Has Barely Measured the Ride.
Good work is underway. This summer, NASA, the Naval Research Laboratory, and the National Center for Atmospheric Research launched INSPYRE, a six-week mission that flew a research jet into towering fire-generated thunderstorms called pyrocumulonimbus clouds. Scientists had already counted 11 of these firestorm events in the western United States by late July, at least six of them over Colorado. The project manager described the turbulence close to the fires as really bad.
That is exactly the right mission, and it answers big questions about where fire storms form and where their smoke goes. But a research jet at altitude is not an air tanker at 200 feet, or a helicopter dipping a bucket, or a lead plane threading a canyon. The most dangerous layer for firefighting aircraft is the low, hot, shifting air right above the burn, near the terrain. What that air does to a wing, gust by gust, has never been mapped the way aviation maps everything else that can kill a pilot.
Prescribed Burns Are the Laboratory That Already Exists
A wildfire picks its own time and place. A prescribed burn does not. It is planned, permitted, scheduled, and watched by trained crews from start to finish. That makes it the safest possible place to study fire-driven air.
The idea has a proven track record. From 2008 to 2012, the interagency RxCADRE project, backed by the Forest Service, the Defense Department, NASA, and universities, instrumented prescribed fires at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida. Small unmanned aircraft flew over the burns alongside piloted aircraft, and each prescribed fire was run as its own organized incident so research and operations could share the sky safely.
Today, drones over prescribed fire are routine. The Forest Service now uses drones to light prescribed burns in terrain too steep or remote for ground crews and reports that drone ignitions have treated more than 134,000 acres. The airspace procedures, the training, and the burn plans are already in place. The missing piece is the measurement.
Why Subscale Aircraft Are the Right Tool
Aviation solved this kind of problem decades ago. When NASA needed to study loss-of-control conditions too risky for a full-size airliner, it built AirSTAR, a 5.5 percent dynamically scaled model of a transport jet, and flew it into those conditions instead. A scale model can be pushed harder than a crewed aircraft, and if it breaks, no one dies.
That is the logic behind Edison Aerospace's newest proposal. Edison wants to fly subscale model aircraft over prescribed burns to collect data on what highly convective, fire-driven air does to an aircraft. That data can help improve aviation safety over wildfires: for tanker and helicopter crews, for the people who plan their routes and altitudes, and for every unmanned aircraft that will share that airspace in the years ahead.
"We are looking for departments that conduct prescribed burns and are willing to work with us, so Edison can test how unmanned aircraft behave above the fire," said Gene Avakyan, CEO of Edison Aerospace.
The approach follows the rule every flight test program lives by. Measure first. Fly the risk with a model. Put people in the air only after the numbers are in.
The Same Air the Relay Aircraft Has to Work In
There is a second reason this testing matters, and it is personal to every crew on the line.
As Pentagon Times reported this month, Edison has proposed a safety system for wildland firefighters: a small body-worn node that shares each firefighter's position and vital signs, linked through a long-wing unmanned aircraft that loiters above the fire and acts as a flying radio relay. The aircraft is designed to stay up most of a shift by riding rising air, and to hold station 1,000 to 2,500 feet above the fire area, standing off to the side rather than circling over the flames.
That design depends on convection. Rising air is what keeps a soaring aircraft aloft for hours. Too much of it, too close to the fire, is what tears aircraft apart. The line between those two conditions has to be drawn from real data, not guesswork. Flights over prescribed burns draw that line before the relay aircraft is ever asked to hold station over a crew.
The stakes are clear. On June 27, a federal helitack crew was overrun by the Knowles Fire in western Colorado. The crew deployed fire shelters when their helicopter could not land to pick them up, and four firefighters died. It was the deadliest wildland firefighting incident since the Yarnell Hill Fire in 2013. Firefighters on the ground depend on the aircraft above them. Those aircraft have to be able to work, and stay, in the worst air the fire can make.
Path Is Already Being Built
The federal government is moving in the right direction. NASA's ACERO project is building the airspace tools to let crewed aircraft, drones, and ground crews share information during a wildfire and safely fly drones around the clock. The House passed the ACERO Act unanimously in February 2026 to give that work permanent authority, and the bill is now in the Senate. The Senate should pass it.
Integration matters, because unauthorized drones are already a problem. Civilian drones flew into active wildfire airspace at least 74 times in 2026 through September 1, often grounding tankers. The answer is not fewer aircraft. It is aircraft that belong in the plan: authorized, visible to crewed pilots, and under the incident's control. Edison's relay aircraft is designed to carry an FAA-certified transponder with ADS-B IN so tankers and helicopters can be seen by its pilot.
Fire managers hold the key. Burn bosses and land managers already run every prescribed fire as an organized incident with its own plan. Adding instrumented subscale flights to selected burns, as RxCADRE did, costs little and teaches a great deal. Edison is already asking for that opening. "We want to hear from any department that runs prescribed burns and will work with us to let Edison test unmanned aircraft behavior above the fires," Avakyan said.
The men and women who go into harm's way to protect lives and land deserve aircraft that know the air they are flying into, and a link that never loses track of them. Both begin in the same place: over a fire that someone chose to light, with a model airplane recording what the sky does next.
