Axios

Aerial firefighters are responding to this year's busy, unpredictable and deadly wildfire season with more missions, more planes and new tech.

Why it matters: Firefighting aircraft and crews play a vital role in containing major wildfires, and difficult seasons can stretch airborne resources thin.

Driving the news: Nicholas Lynn, vice president of operations at aerial firefighting company Neptune Aviation, tells Axios that it's been operating across the western U.S., "plus Texas, Oklahoma, Nebraska, South Dakota, Minnesota, and Georgia."

• "We haven't had that normal shift where it starts in the Southeast and works its way into the South, and then works its way into the Southwest and kind of North, and then back down to California."
• "We've been really spread out, really bouncing around quite a bit to whatever fire has the severity."

The big picture: The National Interagency Fire Center has recorded nearly 50,000 wildfires so far this year, covering about 7.5 million acres.

• That's compared to the 10-year averages of about 38,800 fires and 4.5 million acres at this point in the year.
• Neptune's nine-aircraft fleet has logged just over 2,900 hours so far this season, compared to 2,500-2,800 hours for a typical full season.

Threat level: Aerial firefighting presents a unique and dangerous challenge, with pilots flying low over the often-rugged terrain and through smoky, low-visibility conditions.

• The Aug. 7 death of two helicopter pilots battling a major fire about two and a half hours south of Salt Lake City rocked the wildland firefighting community.

What they're saying: Sam Davis, CEO of aerial firefighting company Bridger Aerospace, tells Axios that several factors are contributing to tougher wildfire seasons: Hotter temperatures, dry forests with lots of wildfire fuel, and more people moving into wildfire-prone areas.

• "So those three things continue to become worse and worse every year, and create a lot of emergency situations where we have to be able to answer that call."

The intrigue: Davis says that Bridger the company has been rolling out new sensors and other tech that can change the way wildfires are "detected, responded to and fought on the ground."

• "We have just incredible sensor success stories as we've been live-streaming down to ground crews what our planes overhead are seeing, and we've been introducing that ... with wide-area motion imagery and gimbal sensors that can zoom in on embers flying through the air and starting new spot fires on a roof, for example."

Bridger is also developing AI-powered fire modeling tech designed to predict a wildfire's next move, Davis says.

• "That data intelligence is something that the wildfire industry has been long overdue for, and we're going to put everything behind this because we think it's where it needs to go, and it's where the game is going to be changed."

What's next: In a world-first, Neptune is converting an Airbus A319 into an aerial firefighting behemoth.

• Lynn says that the narrow-body airliner can fly fast enough to get to fires quickly but slow enough to safely drop retardant, has huge carrying capacity, and is familiar to mechanics, with lots of available parts.

The bottom line: This year's conditions are "starting to feel like the new normal," Lynn tells Axios.

• "But I always tell people, I'll tell you what fire season looked like in December."

America's future college pipeline is growing in the South and shrinking across the Northeast and California.

Why it matters: America's next higher-ed reckoning won't hit regions evenly. Colleges in shrinking markets will face a fierce fight for students, while those in growing regions will have to adapt to serve an expanding, more diverse student body.