This blog is for defining, implementing and communicating hi-tech aerial fire fighting capabilities. There are many areas to explore and develop from gryo stabilized geo tracking infrared to video transmission to the ground, but to start with I want to focus for the 2009 fire season on low hanging fruit like: Moving topos in the cockpit with daily GIS updates of fire lines, dozer tracks. drop points, etc.

I have posted a draft whitepaper as a wiki to google docs for group input:
http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=djv55q7_0c2558mgj&invite=dn8pkmr
Please contribute (edit, rewrite, offer ideas). I'm not sure how all of this wiki, blog and stuff works, so don't hesitate to contact me directly (mszaller@yahoo.com, 1-408-623-4303) if you can't get access, or just want to talk, or if you would like me to give you a demo via skype.

My #1 hope is to define an accepted standard process for GIS teams to export fire data from ESRI into an easy format for use in the cockpit on a touch-screen Tablet PC. The whitepaper describes DeLorme Topo 7 because I have found it to by far the easiest and most functional, but this has not yet been settled. DeLorme has sent their more sophisticated version, XMap, to our team for evaluation.

My #2 goal is to tell the aerial fire fighting industry (Air Attacks, reconnaissance, tankers, lead planes, helicopters) about this practically free capability and how to use it.