The sun was shining in Boise on a recent Wednesday afternoon, but a field near the airport got a few thousand gallons of precipitation thanks to a massive C-130 Hercules air tanker.
This was part of a five-day training in late April for a special team of military personnel who will help fight wildfires if the Forest Service’s fleet of private contractors can’t meet the demand.
The team is called MAFFS, which stands for Modular Airborne Firefighting Systems.
“We fly C-130 aircraft that are DOD assets — Department of Defense C-130s — that we can fly anywhere in the world, do low-level flying, airdrop missions, just hauling things from point A to point B,” said Varun Purohit, a pilot and MAFFs commander in training.
Purohit said fighting wildfires isn’t the majority of his job, but the MAFFS teams have been increasingly used in the last few years. Forest Service and military personnel say that all eight MAFFS air tankers were deployed in 2020 and 2021.