This year has been a hard-to-forget fire season for both its longevity and intensity. Nowhere has been immune to the wrath of these wildfires, from sagebrush grasslands to mountain forests. Fires have been ignited by lightning or human-caused, compounded by a hot and dry summer season. With firefighting resources at maximum capacity, it wasn’t surprising to see the U.S. Forest Service’s late season hiring announcement. And each time I see a fire-fighting helicopter flying over the Deschutes River with a long-line bucket dangling below, I wonder if these aircraft have equipment produced right here in Bend by Kawak Aviation Technologies, Inc.
If you say, “Who?” you are not alone.
“There is some truth to that,” said Andy Mills, Kawak Aviation’s vice president of business development. “We’re well known in our niche markets, but the consumers of our niche market aren’t necessarily in the Bend area.”
Kawak Aviation Technologies was founded in 1993 by Doug Sawyer and Mike Reightley as Ag-Air Systems. Both men were engineers working in heavy machinery hydraulics when they were approached by some agricultural customers to improve spray systems.
“With their hydraulic expertise, they were able to design [a] better spray system,” said Mills. The company created the first elector proportional auxiliary hydraulic power system for spray equipment for agricultural aircraft, which eventually led them to develop spray systems for helicopters. “That opened up a whole new world and eventually they parlayed that expertise into other things,” added Mills. Though Doug has retired, his two sons Andrew and Steve, along with Reightley, are the principal owners of the company.
The name Kawak is from Chinook jargon meaning “to fly.” This aerial intention is foremost in Kawak Aviation’s mission, which is to improve lives through aviation innovation.
“It’s matching the right components and power to what the requirements are to make any given system perform,” said Mills. One example is an improved snorkel pump which sucks up water into a helicopter tank. “The pumps that were attached to the tanks were not high quality, just an after-market pump that would last for a couple of seasons. When you’re flying helicopters, the risky part of the flight envelope is going in and out of the dip cycle.” That can be a huge factor, especially when the dip site is a creek or a small lake or lined with trees and the aircraft has to hover, with no lift, and then suck up a maximum load of water in a short period of time. “So, the faster you can get in and get out of the dip site, the better off you are,” added Mills.
Around five or six years ago, with these pumps and parts in use by CalFire and Los Angeles County, two of the most renowned aerial firefighting entities in the U.S., the two organizations approached Kawak to develop a new firefighting tank for their new Blackhawk helicopters that were replacing old ones in the fleet. “Kawak won a competitive bid to design and build a new generation of a firefighting tank that is now widely known as the Firehawk helicopter tank,” said Mills.
A huge amount of engineering design effort went into the design and development of the tank, including interior baffles to easily load water and then evacuate it quickly when the tank doors open. “What the professionals want is a water column (from the water drop) that holds together as good as possible and does what it’s supposed to do when it hits the fire and is able to penetrate light tree canopies,” said Mills. Additional components of the tank system include a new generation of high-speed pump and a retractable snorkel which is unique in the field of firefighting tanks.
Kawak also designed the Cascade Fire Bucket, a lightweight bucket designed to fill rapidly that is collapsable for easy transport. The company has also designed an unmanned Blue Devil II Airship that was used in Afghanistan, and has retrofitted retired passenger airliners with cargo door conservations for airfreight companies, to name just a few of the many projects that this Bend-based company has designed and manufactured in its pursuit of improving lives through aerial innovation.
This article appears in Source Weekly October 24, 2024.
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