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Water-bombing pilots 'consistently tasked too late' when fighting bushfires, royal commission hears

<span>Photograph: Brook Mitchell/Getty Images</span>
Photograph: Brook Mitchell/Getty Images

Pilots flying water-bombing aircraft are “consistently tasked too late for fires” and sit idle on the tarmac until conditions worsen, the royal commission into national natural disaster arrangements has been told.

The inquiry also heard that the radio networks used by firefighting agencies in each jurisdiction are “largely incompatible” with each other and the lack of national coordination meant that resources were not always used effectively.

John McDermott, the president of McDermott Aviation, a company that clocked up 10,000 hours of aerial firefighting during the 2019-2020 bushfires, said that only three states – Victoria, Western Australia and occasionally Tasmania – positioned aircraft on standby, to be airborne within 15 minutes of a fire being reported.

Related: Australians say ABC saved lives during summer bushfires, royal commission told

In other states, they have to be tasked to a fire, and that call can be made too late.

“We are consistently tasked to fires too late and miss the opportunity for a hard initial attack,” McDermott said.

“Watching the fire develop when you’re sitting with a helicopter ready to go and attack it is a very frustrating exercise. We’ve obviously not allowed to go and attack the fire until we’re directed to attack it.”

McDermott said they were frequently not dispatched until the wind had changed, “and by that stage, often the fire’s already off and running, and it’s a bigger problem for everybody”.

“There’s often long periods of inaction – it would appear to us to be inaction– before being called to the fire ground.”

Philip Hurst, the chief executive of the Aerial Application Association of Australia, said the lack of “overriding and overarching” national systems made it difficult for aerial firefighting in Australia to improve.

Hurst said there were no national systems in place for safety management, continuous improvement, quality assurance, incident reporting or pilot feedback – a fact he pointed out in a parliamentary inquiry into bushfires in 2003, but has yet to be addressed.

He said Australia should have a national aerial firefighting strategy that prioritised the use of predetermined dispatch, or having aircraft on standby to respond quickly to fires within a certain area. The industry peak body is also calling for the standard seasonal firefighting contract to be extended from 84 days to 120 days.

Richard Alder, the general manager of the National Aerial Firefighting Centre, said the different radio systems used by each jurisdiction meant that aircraft operating in border areas were often installed with six radios – two for aeronautical communications and two each for tactical communication with the different fire agencies.

Alder said it was “currently impractical” to provide standard tactical radios in all firefighting aircraft Australia-wide “because each state and territory adopts a different system that are largely incompatible”.

Related: Australia's severe bushfire season was predicted and will be repeated, inquiry told

Lack of compatible radios sometimes played a role in resource deployment, the royal commission heard. Ruth Ryan, the corporate fire manager for HPV plantations, which lost 6,300 hectares of plantations in Victoria this summer, said she would like to see “state borders dissolved, effectively, especially for aerial support”.

HPV is under contact to share its firefighting resources, including air support and 280 trained firefighters, with Victoria’s Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning.

Ryan said that for plantations in the south-west of the state, the closest aerial support was often in South Australia but because of the difference in radio systems she did not know if it was coming.

“If I was sitting 20km inside the Victorian border, I cannot, unless I’ve got yet another radio in my vehicle, I cannot hear what’s happening in SA as far as any dispatch,” she said.

The royal commission has received an additional 3,162 documents, totalling 44,000 pages, since the Friday before the public hearings began, senior counsel Dominique Hogan Doran said. That has caused delays to its proposed hearing schedule.

The commission is due to hold hearings for the rest of this week, then resume on 16 June. The 1,700 public submissions it received will begin to be published from next week.