INTERNATIONAL
Ag Operator in South of Brazil Adds Aerial Firefighting to His Operation by Ernesto Franzen
(L-R) André Cappellari, Luís Augusto Damiani and Marcos Antônio Camargo keep COVID-19 distancing, each standing in front of the aircraft respectively flown at the Guasso-Boi fire. Inset: (L-R) Cappellari, Damiani and Camargo next to Itagro’s AT402B.
A 24 | agairupdate.com
The southernmost state of Brazil, Rio Grande do Sul, has a long history in Brazilian ag aviation – the first aerial application in Brazil was flown there in 1947 – but little aerial firefighter activity so far. The state normally has a regular rain regime that keeps vegetation from turning dry and combustible. But summers recently started to alternate between very rainy and very dry. And the summer of 2020 (in the southern hemisphere) has been anything but normal. It has been unusually dry, with only 20 to 50% the normal rainfall and up to over 40 days without any rain. The same drought that is adversely affecting farmers and ag-aviation operations made conditions favorable for wildfires. In the city of Alegrete, ag-aviation company Itagro - Itapororó Aviação Agrícola Ltda., a very progressive ag operation featured twice in the Brazilian edition of AgAir Update, has suddenly seen calls for aerial firefighting operations. Itagro had fought fires three times before, including once on a commercial eucalyptus plantation. With the first such call this year, firefighting ops went large scale on April 20, after owner/operator Marcos Antônio Camargo
received a call the night before from a farmer, saying there was a fire out of control on a field in a place called Guasso-Boi. Camargo promptly started to plan the operation, in order to waste no time as the day dawned. Camargo’s training for firefighting started when he completed a simulator course for the AT-502 in the US, which included firefighting operations. Itagro’s fleet of Ipanemas and one AT-402B were made available to use in these firefighting operations in Guasso-Boi. As there was no fire retardant available in Rio Grande do Sul, Itagro’s aircraft had to drop plain water on the fires. The AT-402B has a capacity of 400-gallons, while the 210-gallon Ipanema is limited to about 165-gallons for firefighting salvos. Despite this, Camargo planned an operation that proved to be extremely effective, proving that when used smartly even smaller ag-planes can be useful in a fire emergency. Before daylight, he located the nearest satellite strip to the fires that could accommodate an AT402B and had water available. He then had a ground crew drive a support truck to set up an operational base there. This turned out to be
