Sector safety performance: aerial firefighting

Between 2000 and April 2023, the ATSB received 168 reported occurrences for this sector, which is a yearly average of 7.2 occurrences.

There were 32 accidents over this period, with 6 fatal accidents, 3 for both aeroplanes and helicopters.

We have presented the breakdown of occurrences for aeroplanes vs helicopters in Table 1.

The higher number of accident and serious incidents for helicopters coincides with the higher-flying hours. However, the incident numbers are much lower in comparison to aeroplanes which have only a third of the flying hours.

These reporting rates didn't align with what operators were reporting to agencies. This may indicate an issue with the reporting culture of incidents within this sector.

Source: Bureau of Infrastructure and Transport Research Economics (BITRE), ATSB Occurrence Database

Accidents per million flying hours

For the period the evaluated (2014 to 2021) the fatal accident rate for aeroplanes is double the rate for helicopters. Both aircraft types had one fatal event in this period, however the flying hours for helicopters during this time was significantly higher. The serious incident rate for helicopters was significantly higher, where the incident rate for aeroplanes was closer to three times that of helicopters.

Source: BITRE, ATSB occurrence database

Please note: we calculated the rates in table 2 based on the hours from VH-mark aircraft only. While the number of occurrences also include overseas registered aircraft. As such there is slightly over-estimate in the rates by about 2% (fixed-wing) to 6% (rotary-wing).