Conair Aviation groups are coming home this week.
Another long, grueling wildfire season means they’ve missed out again on any summer fun most of us get to experience.
It means long periods away, missing time with friends and family.
“Connecting with the kids,” firefighting pilot Andrew Bailes told Global News.
“You always miss that first day of school and the moments you want to have.”
Fellow pilot Troy Rennie said luckily they have good spouses and partners who support what they do.
These are the sacrifices Bailes and Rennie, along with many other, make every year.
From the pilots in the air to the maintenance engineers on the ground, it’s a team facing pressure and exhaustion daily but driven by the high stakes involved.
They are emotionally invested in protecting people and properties and take it hard if things don’t turn out well.
“We always wonder, could we have seen it coming, where did we go wrong, or how we could have done this better,” Michael Godwin, fleet manager of amphibious flight operations, said.
The aerial firefight is about containment. This year’s dry conditions made it incredibly frustrating at times.
The work isn’t quite over. Now is the time to revisit strategies and perhaps make revisions for the next season. Like most teams, they deal in wins. Victories over each fire – even drawing some comparisons to a Stanley Cup-winning coach.
“He knows all the close calls and the stupid luck that got them where they are,” Godwin said. “He also knows, how is he going to repeat this next year?”
Training starts again in six months in preparation to pick up the fight all over again.
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