Todd O’Hara, CEO of TracPlus, explains how shared operational data is replacing manual coordination to improve aerial firefighting safety, visibility and decision making.
What does coordinating a fast-moving aerial response look like today, and in what ways does the manual way start to break down?
I’ll describe a room I have stood in. A handful of very experienced people at the front with phones, radios, and a physical status board, directing a large aerial response. It works, and the people running it are excellent. But it is manual, fragile, and invisible to anyone not standing in that room.
That way of working has no margin. One story that has stuck with me concerns a ready aircraft which had sat unused for a day because its marker had slipped behind the board and nobody knew it was available. The people were not the failure point; the operating picture lived in a few heads instead of somewhere everyone could see it. At heart, this is a coordination challenge before it is a technology one.
How did we get here? What changed to make real-time operational data both possible and necessary?
Aerial firefighting is already one of the most data-rich environments in aviation. Telemetry off the aircraft and vehicles, sensors on board that record the details of every drop and satellite heat detection. It is all there. For a long time, each piece sat in its own silo, and the industry built good tools for looking at each silo separately.
What changed is volume and pace. Longer seasons, more aircraft, more organisations sharing the same airspace, and data arriving faster than methods built around phones and radios were designed for. That tipped real-time operational data from a nice-to-have into a necessity. Nobody in this industry is asking for more data; they are drowning in it. What they want is for the data they already have to make sense at the moment they need it. The industry is still working that through, and there are clear leaders showing what good looks like.
You call TracPlus a software and data company. What does that vantage point let you understand that a single operator can’t?
We have spent more than 18 years collecting, standardising, and making sense of operational data for some of the most demanding aviation operations in the world. That is 700-plus customers across more than 40 countries, and the platform now processes over 800,000 flight hours of data a year.
The vantage point that gives us is seeing how many different jurisdictions solve the same problem. What works in California, what works in New South Wales, what an operator with five aircraft does differently from a national programme. It lets us see what actually works in practice rather than what sounds good. The difference between an agency leading and one working to catch up is rarely how much data they hold. It is whether that data is getting in the hands of those who need it and working for their decisions.
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