Rehberg announced Friday afternoon he had reached an agreement with Forest Service Undersecretary Mark Rey in which the Forest Service would pay for finding the needed data from Lockheed Martin Corp., the manufacturer of the P2v tanker planes that Neptune uses.
"The best news in all this is that we've made it an important enough issue that Lockheed and the Forest Service have already begun the work on getting the necessary date for certification," Rehberg said in an e-mail message. "I'm optimistic this will be wrapped up in a matter of days, rather than months, which is crucial for our efforts to get Minden Air and Neptune Aviation back in the air to fight these wildfires."
"That's fantastic that they're looking for that from Lockheed," Neptune President Kristen Schloemer said Friday. "But the Forest Service request for information on June 2 didn't request operational service life reports from Lockheed. They asked for this 10 days ago. Our point is there's no reason we can't be operational in the meantime."
Neptune employed about 100 people in the Missoula area before its Forest Service air tanker contract was canceled May 10. Minden Air is a similar company based in Nevada which also lost its contract. Schloemer said Friday her company had to lay off about 20 pilots, but was keeping its maintenance and administrative staff on the payroll while the debate continued.
The Forest Service announced it was canceling contracts for 33 air tankers because of concerns for public safety and airworthiness. The decision was triggered after three air tankers crashed while working forest fires last year. None of those tankers belonged to Neptune, nor were they the kind of plane Neptune flies.
The Forest Service demanded detailed reports on the durability and practical life span of all planes it might contract with. Neptune flies eight P2vs, a former Navy submarine warfare plane that was in production from the late 1940s to the early 1960s. The Neptune planes were from the latter end of that production cycle, and have received extensive modifications since then, Schloemer said. The company's current engineering reports have been approved by DynCorp, the Texas firm reviewing airplane safety for the Forest Service, she said.
However, Forest Service reviewers insisted on seeing the original Lockheed engineering reports. Lockheed Martin officials initially refused to produce the reports, saying they were proprietary secrets.
"We own all the Lockheed engineering data except for the developmental data," said Neptune director of operations and maintenance Greg Jones. "This report is for an early version of our model aircraft, and doesn't figure for our modifications of jets, or wingtips, or fuel. That's why we can't figure out why the Forest Service is hanging their hat on this data."
Jones said Neptune has extensively documented its planes' "operational fatigue life" which reviews how much stress and use the plane can be used given the kind of missions it flies. The Neptune research specifically looks at the kind of impact the planes receive flying loads of retardant to forest fires, he said.
But the Forest Service has been demanding an "operational service life report," which Jones said was the review Lockheed did in 1949 when the plane was first developed. He said that report was similar to a doctor guessing that a baby will live 100 years when looking at it in the delivery room, without knowing that infant might become a smoker and die of lung cancer at 45.
Neptune had been flying firefighting missions in California and Florida when the contract was canceled. Schloemer said the company had lost a substantial amount of business since then, but did not give a specific figure.
This year's fire season has had a relatively slow start, according to National Interagency Fire Center spokeswoman Rose Davis. Speaking from Boise on Friday, Davis said the lower 48 states were below 50 percent of the 10-year average for acres burned by this date. The lack of an El Nino weather system pushing fire-starting thunderstorms through the region was a major factor she said.
"Nobody's getting a real workout yet," Davis said. She added she'd not seen any new timetable for negotiating with Lockheed Martin or otherwise settling the airworthiness matter.
Rehberg's e-mail stated that Lockheed Martin "on its own and without a contract - has agreed to gather best data on the P2v on behalf of the Forest Service. Š In the end, this more complete data that Lockheed Martin is gathering will more than satisfy the need for information for certification."
Reporter Rob Chaney can be reached at 523-5382 or at rchaney@missoulian.com.
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