# Who Gets Paid to Fight the Fire: The Rented Air Force, the Retardant Contract, and Who Foots the Bill

The government owns almost none of the air tankers it flies. One company holds a $1.3 billion sole-source contract for the retardant. Here is where the suppression dollars actually go.

Author: J.A. Watte
Published: July 16, 2026
Source: https://jwatte.com/blog/who-gets-paid-to-fight-wildfires/

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*This is the follow-the-money companion to [the piece on what wildfire suppression costs](/blog/wildfire-firefighting-cost-ecosystem/). That one tracked the roughly two-to-four billion dollars a year the government spends fighting fire. This one asks the next question: once the money leaves the Treasury, who receives it? The answer is a small set of private companies, two of them publicly traded, that own the air tankers, mix the retardant, and field the contract crews the government rents by the season.*

Begin with the fact that surprises most people. When a red-and-white air tanker drops a curtain of retardant on a ridge, the federal government almost certainly does not own that airplane. It rents it. The United States owns very little of the large firefighting air fleet it uses; it contracts nearly all of it from private operators, with the National Guard's MAFFS-equipped C-130s as the main federally owned exception ([National Interagency Fire Center](https://www.nifc.gov/resources/aircraft/airtankers)). The same is true down the line: the retardant, the ground crews, the mobile kitchens, and the shower units are overwhelmingly bought from private vendors, incident by incident. Suppression is a public mission executed, in large part, by a private industry. Following the dollars to that industry is the cleanest way to understand both why the cost curve is what it is and where the honest efficiency questions actually sit.

## The rented air force

The tanker fleet is a roster of private operators most people have never heard of. 10 Tanker Air Carrier flies the four DC-10 Very Large Air Tankers, tail numbers 910, 911, 912, and 914, each able to drop up to about 9,400 gallons ([Aerial Fire Magazine](https://aerialfiremag.com/2026/05/01/commercial-veterans-firefighting-giants/)). Neptune Aviation flies converted BAe-146 jets, Aero-Flite and its parent Conair fly RJ85s and Q400s, Coulson Aviation flies C-130s and a 737 Fireliner, and Erickson flies MD-87 tankers and the S-64 Air Crane helicopter. These are converted airliners and cargo planes, and they are subject to the same airworthiness rules as any old aircraft: when the Federal Aviation Administration grounded the DC-10 family in November 2025 over an engine-pylon fatigue concern after a fatal UPS MD-11 crash, the firefighting DC-10s went down with them until the order was lifted in May 2026 ([AVweb](https://avweb.com/aviation-news/dc-10-md-10-grounded-emergency-ad-md-11/)).

Two of these vendors are publicly traded, which is a gift for anyone trying to size the business honestly, because it replaces guesswork with audited filings. Bridger Aerospace went public through a SPAC merger that closed in January 2023 and trades on the Nasdaq as BAER; it became the largest private operator of CL-415 Super Scoopers after buying four Spanish aircraft in 2023 ([Bridger Aerospace](https://ir.bridgeraerospace.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/16/bridger-aerospace-and-jack-creek-announce-closing-of)). Its 2024 revenue was a record 98.6 million dollars against a net loss of 15.6 million, and by full-year 2025 it reported revenue up about 25 percent and a swing to positive net income ([Bridger Aerospace](https://ir.bridgeraerospace.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/55/bridger-aerospace-announces-record-fourth-quarter-and-full)). That is the scale of a single mid-size tanker vendor, and it is a real, public number rather than an estimate.

How the government pays for aircraft is where the central cost question lives, and it is not a scandal, it is a genuine trade-off. There are two contract types. Exclusive-use contracts reserve an aircraft for the whole season, paying a daily availability rate whether or not it flies, plus an hourly rate when it does. Call-when-needed contracts pay nothing until the aircraft is summoned, but at a materially higher price: in 2017 the average daily rate for a large call-when-needed air tanker ran about 54 percent higher than an aircraft on exclusive use ([Wildfire Today](https://wildfiretoday.com/how-much-does-it-cost-to-drop-retardant-on-a-fire/)). Documented rates give the order of magnitude, though they should be read as dated and illustrative rather than a current price list: exclusive-use large tankers have been reported around 30,000 dollars a day against more than 45,000 for call-when-needed, and Type 2 helicopters in 2018 carried daily availability rates in the several-thousand-dollar range plus roughly 1,900 to 2,200 dollars an hour in flight ([Wildfire Today](https://wildfiretoday.com/34-type-2-helicopters-awarded-contracts/)). The tension is real: an exclusive-use tanker that sits idle in a light fire year looks wasteful, but it is cheaper than scrambling call-when-needed aircraft in a bad one. That pre-positioning premium, not fraud, is the actual efficiency debate, and the Government Accountability Office has long faulted the agencies for not collecting the data to resolve it ([GAO-13-684](https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-13-684)).

## The retardant, and the contract almost no one bids against

The red slurry has an owner too, and it is close to a single company. Perimeter Solutions is the near-sole supplier of the Forest Service's long-term aerial fire retardant, sold under the Phos-Chek brand, and in early 2026 it kept a sole-source contract with a five-year total estimated value of about 1.3 billion dollars. The Government Accountability Office upheld the sole-source award on February 6, 2026, dismissing a protest from rival Coulson Aviation on the ground that Coulson did not have a qualified competing product and therefore lacked standing to challenge it ([Bloomberg Law](https://news.bloomberglaw.com/federal-contracting/perimeter-solutions-keeps-1-3-billion-fire-retardant-contract)). This is worth stating carefully. It is not an illegal monopoly; it is a lawful sole-source federal award to the only supplier with a qualified product, and the Agriculture Department frames the five-year deal as saving taxpayers more than 150 million dollars, a projection from the government and the vendor rather than an independently audited figure ([USDA](https://www.usda.gov/about-usda/news/press-releases/2025/09/03/usda-secures-new-long-term-fire-retardant-contract-saving-taxpayers-hundreds-millions)). But a market with one qualified seller is a market with no price competition, and that is the honest structural fact underneath the savings claim.

The retardant carries a second, environmental cost that a court has now named. In May 2023, a federal judge in Montana ruled in Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics v. U.S. Forest Service that dropping retardant into navigable waters without a permit violates the Clean Water Act, the plaintiffs having alleged roughly 750,000 gallons discharged into United States waters between 2012 and 2019. The judge declined to stop the practice, finding the firefighting need outweighed the harm, and instead ordered the Forest Service to pursue a discharge permit and report periodically ([Courthouse News](https://www.courthousenews.com/federal-judge-finds-forest-service-violated-clean-water-act-while-fighting-wildfires/)). Retardant use continues; it is simply now a documented, ongoing legal violation the government is working to permit.

## The ground contractors

Above the aircraft, the visible firefighters are federal. Alongside them, a large private workforce does much of the ground labor. The National Wildfire Suppression Association represents more than 300 private wildland fire contractors that field, by the association's count, more than 600 Type 2 hand crews and some 22,000 pieces of specialized equipment ([National Wildfire Suppression Association](https://nwsa.us/about-us/)). These companies supply engines, crews, bulldozers, mobile kitchens, shower and laundry units, and supply, hired incident by incident through Emergency Equipment Rental Agreements and blanket purchase agreements. They exist because the federal wildland force is finite: about 18,700 federal wildland firefighters and support staff across the Forest Service and the four Interior agencies, roughly 70 percent of them in the Forest Service ([GAO-23-105517](https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-23-105517)). Contract resources let the government scale far above that fixed core in a bad season without carrying the payroll year-round, which is the same logic as renting the aircraft.

## The human ledger

The people on the line are covered by two different systems depending on who signs their check, and the gap between them is stark. A federal wildland firefighter injured or killed on duty is covered by the Federal Employees' Compensation Act, and a line-of-duty death triggers the Public Safety Officers' Benefits program, a one-time federal payment set at 461,656 dollars for deaths on or after October 1, 2025 and indexed every year ([Department of Justice](https://bja.ojp.gov/program/psob/resources/benefits-by-year)). A contract crew member doing the same work on the same fireline is not a federal employee and is covered instead by their employer's workers' compensation, a separate and generally less generous regime. Same smoke, same risk, two very different safety nets, decided by whether the name on the paycheck is the government or a contractor.

## Who pays, and who sometimes pays it back

The front-line payer is the taxpayer, federal and state, as the companion piece details. But the taxpayer is not always the final payer, because when a fire is started by someone's negligence, the government sues to recover its costs. The landmark example is the 2000 Storrie Fire in California, which burned across roughly 52,000 acres after a Union Pacific rail operation. The United States claimed more than 22 million dollars in suppression costs alone, a federal court held that California's fire cost-recovery statute could support the claim, and the case ultimately settled in 2010 for about 102 million dollars covering suppression and resource damage, the largest forest-fire settlement in Forest Service history ([U.S. District Court records](https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/2461827/united-states-v-union-pacific-r-co/)). The modern version runs through utilities: in and around the PG&E bankruptcy, California agencies pursued large suppression and response claims, and Cal Fire has moved to recover the cost of fires like the 2021 Dixie Fire ([Courthouse News](https://www.courthousenews.com/california-governor-rejects-13-5-billion-pge-settlement-with-wildfire-victims/)).

Two honest caveats keep this from being a tidy story of the negligent paying in full. Recovery is partial and slow, and the amounts claimed are not the amounts collected. And a legal doctrine works against the government: under the free public services doctrine, a government generally cannot bill a wrongdoer for the routine cost of public services like firefighting unless a statute authorizes it or the fire damaged government property. Cost recovery is a real and growing channel, especially against utilities, but it recoups a fraction of the bill, and the taxpayer fronts all of it first.

## The ledger reading

Follow the suppression dollar to its destination and the picture is neither a scandal nor a clean bill of health. It is a public mission run through a private supply chain, and that structure is mostly defensible: it would cost far more for the government to own, insure, and maintain a fleet of converted airliners that sit idle in quiet years than to rent capacity from specialists who carry that risk, and a single qualified retardant supplier delivers continuity when a dozen fires burn at once. The legitimate questions are narrower and sharper than "the fire-industrial complex," which is a critique worth naming but not a verdict. They are whether the pre-positioning premium on exclusive-use aircraft is priced right, whether a sole-source retardant market can ever discipline its own price, whether contract firefighters should carry a thinner safety net than the federal crews beside them, and whether the government recovers enough from the utilities and railroads whose equipment starts so many of these fires. The money is not hidden. Two of the biggest vendors file quarterly with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The questions are about how the deals are structured, and those are answerable in daylight.

## Related reading

- [Who pays to put out the fire](/blog/wildfire-firefighting-cost-ecosystem/): the companion piece on what suppression costs and how the interagency machine works.
- [When the bills rise faster than the raise](/blog/defend-your-wage-low-growth-corridors/): the household side of wildfire, where the risk is driving home-insurance premiums and non-renewals.
- [The working ledgers](/blog/the-working-ledgers/): the series that reads a public program by following its money rather than its headlines.

## Fact-check notes and sources

Every figure was checked against a primary or authoritative source; links are inline.

- **The rented fleet** (the government contracts rather than owns the large air tanker fleet; 10 Tanker's four DC-10 VLATs; the November 2025 to May 2026 DC-10 grounding tied to the UPS MD-11 airworthiness directive; Bridger Aerospace as a public company with 2024 revenue of 98.6 million dollars and a 15.6 million dollar net loss, turning to positive net income in 2025; and the exclusive-use versus call-when-needed contract structure with the 54 percent call-when-needed premium): [NIFC](https://www.nifc.gov/resources/aircraft/airtankers), [Aerial Fire Magazine](https://aerialfiremag.com/2026/05/01/commercial-veterans-firefighting-giants/), [AVweb](https://avweb.com/aviation-news/dc-10-md-10-grounded-emergency-ad-md-11/), [Bridger Aerospace](https://ir.bridgeraerospace.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/55/bridger-aerospace-announces-record-fourth-quarter-and-full), and [Wildfire Today](https://wildfiretoday.com/how-much-does-it-cost-to-drop-retardant-on-a-fire/). Aviation rate figures are dated and illustrative, not a current federal price list, and were flagged by [GAO-13-684](https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-13-684).
- **The retardant** (Perimeter Solutions' near-sole supply of Phos-Chek and its roughly 1.3 billion dollar five-year sole-source contract, upheld by GAO on February 6, 2026 after Coulson's protest was dismissed for lack of standing; the USDA-and-vendor projection of more than 150 million dollars in savings; and the 2023 Clean Water Act ruling that named but did not stop the practice): [Bloomberg Law](https://news.bloomberglaw.com/federal-contracting/perimeter-solutions-keeps-1-3-billion-fire-retardant-contract), [USDA](https://www.usda.gov/about-usda/news/press-releases/2025/09/03/usda-secures-new-long-term-fire-retardant-contract-saving-taxpayers-hundreds-millions), and [Courthouse News](https://www.courthousenews.com/federal-judge-finds-forest-service-violated-clean-water-act-while-fighting-wildfires/). The savings figure is an unaudited government and vendor projection; "sole-source," not "monopoly," is the accurate description.
- **The ground contractors** (more than 300 private contractors fielding over 600 Type 2 crews and about 22,000 pieces of equipment via the National Wildfire Suppression Association, supplementing about 18,700 federal wildland firefighters and support staff): [NWSA](https://nwsa.us/about-us/), an industry association whose counts are attributed as such, and [GAO-23-105517](https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-23-105517).
- **The human ledger** (the Federal Employees' Compensation Act and the 461,656-dollar Public Safety Officers' Benefits death benefit effective October 1, 2025 for federal firefighters, versus employer workers' compensation for contract crews): [Department of Justice](https://bja.ojp.gov/program/psob/resources/benefits-by-year).
- **Cost recovery** (the Storrie Fire suppression claim of more than 22 million dollars and its roughly 102 million dollar 2010 settlement, the largest Forest Service forest-fire settlement; the California cost-recovery statute; and the utility-era claims around PG&E and the Dixie Fire, limited by the free public services doctrine): [U.S. District Court records](https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/2461827/united-states-v-union-pacific-r-co/) and [Courthouse News](https://www.courthousenews.com/california-governor-rejects-13-5-billion-pge-settlement-with-wildfire-victims/). Amounts claimed are not amounts recovered, and recovery is partial.

*This post is informational and journalistic, describing public programs, federal contracts, court records, and the filings of publicly traded companies. It is not legal, financial, or investment advice, and nothing here is a recommendation about any security. Figures are drawn from government reports, court records, and company disclosures, with vendor, association, and dated or illustrative figures labeled as such. Mentions of specific companies are nominative fair use, with no affiliation implied.*


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