A large California Air National Guard tanker sinks into the smoke-filled Pacific Palisades canyon, rushing to the ground below and filling the windshield. Sirens blare in the cockpit, and a recorded female voice warns, “Altitude! Height!”
Surveillance video, shot over the pilot's left shoulder, shows the massive plane aggressively working the yoke to get it airborne, on target to release a drenching plume of fire. Next to his elbow, Hollywood-level drama fills the rest of the frame, the bright red, no-fuss box of a Chick-fil-A takeout.
These are the lives of about 100 firefighter pilots who are fighting a hot, dirty and dangerous battle to save Los Angeles from this week's punishing flames. It's a tough, round-the-clock job – eat as much as you can.
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While the rest of us crane our necks to the sky, or click YouTube videos Interviews with pilots to witness what one Cal Fire official called the most intense, complex aerial firefight in U.S. history painted a graphic picture of the struggle to control their ships in extraordinarily treacherous conditions.
People on the ground watch as people on the ground brace themselves with heavily equipped garden hoses as the flames “blow” their homes as they circle the burning hillsides.
“There are no words to describe the horror,” said Los Angeles Fire Department helicopter pilot Joel Smith.
Since the Jan. 7 fire, those pilots have been rotating four-hour shifts to operate more than 50 flights from across the state and country.
It's not California's largest acreage fire Lives lostSo far. But the sheer complexity, it's not on the schedule, said Cal Fire Air Operations Branch Director Paul Corpus.
“This is the first time in the history of the Cal Fire that we've had 24-hour operations,” Corpus said.
From day one they knew it was the battle of their lives.

A Los Angeles Fire Department helicopter takes off at the agency's flight operations center at Van Nuys Airport.
(Christina House/Los Angeles Times)
Dan Child, the LAFD's chief pilot, was only a few hours into his shift that first day when he realized conditions were rapidly deteriorating. Fierce winds — gusting nearly 90 miles per hour in some places — directed traffic to other pilots trying to navigate the turbulent valleys below, struggling to control their craft as he circled overhead.
“We knew if we didn't stop, we'd damage a plane or crash,” said Child, who has been conducting aerial firefights for the LAFD for 15 years. So, he made the painful decision to clear the tasks until things calmed down.
“It's not an easy call. It almost feels like a gut punch,” Child said. “But before we have an accident and someone puts these on the side of a mountain, let's bring them back and let the wind be calm.”
But the next morning, January 8, the skies over the fire were still turbulent and dangerous.
“We were still hitting,” the kid said. “It was really bad.”
Brandon Rudy, the LAFD's assistant division commander for air operations, was assessing the situation with the child in the helicopter that morning and said the conditions were not clear.
“You could hear the hum of the engines, but not only were we dropping, but I could hear the engine changing pitch and noise,” Rudy recalled. “Basically, it freaked us both out.”

A Chinook helicopter drops water on the Palisades Fire in Brentwood.
(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
Later in the week, as the wind began to slow down, it began to fill the skies above Los Angeles. Reinforcements came from the Air National Guard, Cal Fire, Ventura County, Orange County and private contractors across the country.
They include massive DC-10 passenger planes reconfigured to paint entire hillsides with bright red retardant at the leading edge of the flames; Military helicopters are designed to precisely drop columns of life-saving water into burning buildings; And small spotter planes circle overhead and perform intricate mechanical ballet.
There have been other wildfires that have attracted multiple planes, particularly some of the enormous rural fires in the northern part of the state, Corpus said, but never in such congested urban airspace.
When wildfires are burning where they should be – in the woods – it's relatively easy for groups to form a pattern and keep a safe distance from each other as they circle from the water to the flames.
It's a different story in LA, because firefighter pilots can't take up the entire sky.
While LAX, Burbank, Van Nuys and Santa Monica airports are incredibly accommodating for civilian aircraft to fly in and out of, they have had to work with the Federal Aviation Administration to establish restricted airspace for firefighters.
“We come in and say, 'This is our airspace; everybody else get out,''' Corpus said. “That's not even an option.”

A helicopter drops water on a burning building in Altadena after the wind stopped the fall for several hours.
(Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times)
Another problem that comes with fighting fires in an urban landscape is the risk of accidental drops. In general, Corpus said, helicopters don't use large buckets of water when flying over a large city. Corpus said the possibility of one of those payloads being released when a helicopter flies over the 405 or 101 freeways is “always, always in the back of our minds.”
But winter is typically a holiday season for aerial firefighters, as crews perform the extensive maintenance required to keep these machines safely airborne. So when California officials approached private companies to charter aircraft to fight fires, helicopters with internal tanks were often unavailable. They had to take what they could get.
These aircraft and their crews work in some of the toughest, most dangerous conditions they have ever encountered.
First there is air. Most helicopters can't fly in the air at 35 to 40 mph. Even if they did take off, the unpredictable winds and gusts caused by Santa Ana conditions would make flying extraordinarily dangerous.
Ships are loaded with thousands of pounds of fuel and water, so they are under incredible pressure. “With an airplane you're at maximum efficiency the whole time,” said Cal Fire Air Assault Officer John Zuniga. “Maximum power, everything is maxed out.”
So, if something goes wrong, it's not like you can hit the gas and get out of the situation.
And they fly dangerously close to the ground, sometimes no more than 100 feet. “You have a minimal margin for error. If you're pushed by a sudden gust of wind, it's very dangerous,” Zuniga said.
The question becomes whether you can hit what you are aiming for and whether it will make any difference.
From a helicopter, a solid, cylindrical stream of water is dropped onto the flames. You don't want it so compact that it “digs a trench in the ground,” said Kyle Lunstedt, who works as an air traffic controller for Cal Fire, but should be solid enough to have some oomph.
Kyle said that when the wind is gusting to 30 miles per hour, everything you blow will turn into fog and do very little to stop the flames wherever the wind blows.
Another issue affecting the gunfight is drones, often flown by influencers trying to capture footage for their social media feeds. A collision with a fire plane could easily be catastrophic.
“The other day, I believe we had 40 drone incursions in 24 hours,” Zuniga said. This means that the crew must stop extinguishing the fire and wait until they are sure the drone has left.
“A black hawk [helicopter] Designed to be shot in combat,” Zuniga said, leaning against someone at the Santa Monica airport on Tuesday. But if a drone hits the right spot — gets sucked into an engine or hits a tail rotor — the plane can crash and the pilots could easily be killed.
Even relatively minor damage can be fatal because, flying so close to the ground, pilots have no time to react.
One of the two Canadian-made Super Scoopers was seen riding into the ocean next to the Palisades to scoop up water. It was kicked out of the protest last week When a drone hits its wing, it punches a fist-sized hole in the leading edge.
The complexity of flying at night is a relatively new invention for firefighters. Pilots relied on night vision goggles, and during the Palisades and Eaton fires, the light came from a full moon.
You still can't actually see anything like power lines – a huge hazard – but you can see the light flickering from the metal towers. “We can tell which way the towers are oriented by the way they've formed,” Zuniga said.
Night flying ability is key On Friday, the Palisades Fire, pushed out to sea, suddenly turned around and headed north.
Corpus said the big jets, loaded with large amounts of retardant, could only fly during the day, and for a long, agonizing stretch Friday night, as the fire chewed up Mandeville Canyon, threatening Encino and Brentwood, a force of eight helicopters scrambled to hold the fort until the cavalry arrived at dawn.
And it worked. The fire grew to about 1,000 acres and may have damaged or destroyed some homes, but helicopters kept the flames from spreading too far into urban areas. By Saturday evening, much of the region breathed a collective sigh of relief.
For the pilots, even if they fight the fire, there is no quick end in sight. Their shifts are relatively short, four hours in the air followed by eight hours trying to recover from the ground, but the winds are unpredictable and the flights are incredibly intense.
It's a grind, but it's what they signed up for.
“For years and years, we train for things like this,” Smith said. Being in the right place at the right time, to help save someone's life or their home, “is what we're built for.”