UNCONTROLLLED BURN
In the early hours of November 8, 2018, David Kelly saw the smoke column. A veteran air tanker pilot with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, or Cal Fire, Kelly was driving to the department’s Chico air base, about 95 miles north of Sacramento. In the dawn light, he could just make out the feathery wisp of a fire starting to the east. He called Shem Hawkins, his battalion chief at Chico and the air tactical group supervisor on duty that day, and both men sped to the base.
The forecast for that day in November included high winds, so Kelly and Hawkins were up earlier than usual for their shift, expecting some fire activity. At the Chico base, though, the air was strangely calm. Kelly quickly got his plane ready and lifted off, heading 19 miles east to the forested canyons above the mountain town of Paradise, where he’d seen the smoke. It was 7:45 in the morning, and he was the first into the fire.
As soon as Kelly got up in the air, he knew it was trouble. In just 20 minutes, the fire had boiled up angrily, producing a different kind of smoke column: one with a sheared-off anvil shape that was pinned low to the ground by howling 70-mile-an-hour winds. The billowing clouds quickly filled up the entirety of Kelly’s windshield.
Hawkins was right behind. As air tactical group supervisor, he would oversee and coordinate the firefighting efforts from the air. From the back of a spotter plane flown by pilot Stephanie Kudar, he got his first good look from above. The fire was already burning 1,000 acres and growing at an exponential rate, fueled by the heavily wooded terrain and funneled downslope by the wind. He immediately radioed for additional aircraft, calling in six tankers and six helicopters from nearby bases. Then he radioed Kelly and cleared him to drop the familiar red slurry of retardant around a communications tower, already threatened by the fire, that was critical to local emergency medical services and the county sheriff.
By this time, Kelly, flying lower and closer to the fire, was hitting nasty turbulence. As he rounded the heel of the blaze to attempt a drop, the wind, eddying up fiercely off the ridgeline, blew him sideways toward the communications tower he was supposed to protect. A few hundred feet above the ground, knocked around in the sky by gusts so powerful that his head was ringing, he
