Coulson Aviation’s technology division combines decades of firefighting experience with aerial innovation in suppression, sensing, and situational awareness
Wildfire has always been a race against time.
Over the past several decades, aerial firefighting aircraft have become larger, faster, and more capable. We carry more retardant, move aircraft farther and faster, fight fire at night, and see things from the air that would have been unimaginable to firefighters a generation ago.
And yet, anyone who has spent a career around wildfire knows the uncomfortable reality: the fire environment has evolved just as quickly. The people in this industry feel that personally. We have all lost friends and colleagues. We know the risks accepted by firefighters working below us and by the crews flying into the same difficult environment overhead.
Still, we have to be there. Communities are threatened. Ground firefighters need support. Sometimes somebody needs an aircraft to arrive over a ridge at exactly the right moment.
That responsibility is where EmberWorks begins.
Innovation with a purpose
Coulson Aviation has spent decades operating large airtankers, heavy-lift helicopters, and tactical/ intelligence aircraft on wildfires around the world. That experience has provided a firsthand understanding of the challenges facing aerial firefighting, along with opportunities to improve how the industry responds.
EmberWorks was established to turn that operational knowledge into a more focused approach to innovation. By bringing Coulson’s engineering, scientific, and technical capabilities together under a dedicated division, EmberWorks creates a direct connection between the challenges encountered in the field and the development of new solutions.
What distinguishes EmberWorks is that innovation happens within an active aerial firefighting organisation. Engineers and scientists work alongside pilots, firefighters, maintenance personnel, and technology specialists who understand the demands of real-world operations. Their combined expertise ensures that development is guided by practical needs rather than technology alone.
Equally important is the ability to test and refine those solutions using Coulson’s globally active fleet, crews, and operational infrastructure. Ideas can move from concept to integration, flight testing, evaluation, and continued improvement, with lessons from each stage informing the next.
This approach is already shaping new suppression technologies, airborne sensing systems, and situational-awareness capabilities, including two of EmberWorks’ current initiatives: CFR HALO and ORBIT.
CFR HALO: Making every drop count
Long-term fire retardant is one of the fundamental tools of aerial firefighting. Its purpose is straightforward: change the way vegetation burns long enough to slow a fire and give firefighters an advantage. Delivering that advantage from an aircraft is considerably more complicated.
Retardant chemistry matters, but so does everything that happens between manufacturing the product and watching it leave an airtanker. Mixing, storage, pumping, aircraft loading, tank design, drop characteristics, coverage level, vegetation, and environmental conditions can all influence what ultimately happens on the ground.
CFR HALO grew from the idea that retardant itself should evolve alongside the aircraft and delivery systems carrying it. Developed through Coulson Fire Retardant, HALO combines advanced chemistry with Coulson’s experience in aerial retardant delivery. The objective is a long-term fire retardant focused on performance, consistency, operational efficiency, and safety throughout the delivery process.
A larger airtanker can deliver more retardant. A better tank system can improve the quality of the drop. A better retardant can improve the effect created by that aircraft. When those improvements work together, the existing firefighting resource becomes more effective. For the firefighter building line below, that effectiveness is what matters.
EmberWorks is evaluating HALO through laboratory and operational field testing, including aircraft compatibility, corrosion, toxicity, environmental considerations, storage, mixing, and aerial delivery. In May 2026, Coulson conducted aerial testing at Thermal Airport in California using a C-130 airtanker. These tests provide an opportunity to evaluate the retardant within an operational aircraft delivery system, measure its performance, and apply the findings to continued development.
Our work with retardant is also expanding beyond conventional aerial application. Ground systems, infrastructure protection, and specialised delivery platforms may create additional opportunities to put retardant where it can provide the greatest operational value.
ORBIT: Every aircraft can help us see the fire
There is another resource flying over wildfires every day that we believe remains underused: the aircraft itself.
Airtankers, helicopters, and air tactical aircraft repeatedly pass over and around active fires. From those aircraft comes an extraordinary stream of potential information about where the fire is, where it has been, and what it is doing. Historically, much of that information has depended on what a crew can see and communicate, or on dedicated intelligence aircraft equipped specifically for that mission.
ORBIT, the Operational Reconnaissance and Boundary Intelligence Tracker, is intended to change that. The system uses fixed electro-optical and infrared sensors to collect information passively during normal flight operations.
“Our long-term goal is ambitious: make every firefighting aircraft an intelligence aircraft.”
An airtanker should still be an airtanker. A helicopter should remain focused on its mission. The crew should not have to become sensor operators along the way. Sensors collect information in the background, processing occurs onboard and through connected systems, and useful information can be delivered without adding another complex task to an already busy cockpit.
The system is being developed to identify heat, map active fire perimeters, locate hotspots, ember cast, and follow changes in fire activity over time. It can also begin to answer questions that have historically been difficult to measure, including what happened after a retardant or water drop.
There is a more important possibility. Imagine a ground crew working a division when fire behaviour begins changing beyond their view. An airtanker passes overhead on its way to a drop. Its ORBIT sensors detect the progression and update the fire picture. That information reaches firefighters early enough to influence a decision about an escape route, safety zone, or changing conditions.
The aircraft did not have to be dispatched as an intelligence platform. The pilots did not have to operate another piece of equipment. It was already there.
“Minutes matter in an entrapment. Sometimes seconds matter.”
As ORBIT develops, our objective is to move that information closer to the people who need it, including firefighters on the ground. We are also exploring personnel-awareness technology that could allow the system to understand where firefighters are in relation to changing fire conditions.
No technology eliminates the uncertainty of wildfire. Better information delivered sooner can give people more time to make decisions. If that helps a firefighter recognise deteriorating conditions earlier, move before an escape route is compromised, or avoid an entrapment, the value becomes much larger than the sensor that produced the information.
Building from the fire backward
CFR HALO and ORBIT are different technologies, and they demonstrate how addressing specific operational challenges can lead to new capabilities.
There is also potential for these technologies to reinforce each other. ORBIT, for example, is being developed to evaluate changes in fire activity following aerial drops. Over time, that information could help us better understand retardant effectiveness, aircraft delivery, and fire response, with lessons that can influence future suppression products and delivery systems.
We are applying this thinking to personnel awareness, fire modelling, advanced sensing, and other projects underway within EmberWorks. There is enormous potential in artificial intelligence, autonomous sensing, and predictive modelling. The challenge is turning those technologies into tools that still work when an aircraft is at low altitude in turbulence, the radios are busy, visibility is poor, and the fire is moving faster than expected.
The opportunities extend beyond individual products. As these capabilities develop, we can begin to connect suppression, sensing, and operational intelligence in ways that make existing firefighting resources more effective and give crews a clearer understanding of the environment around them.
The purpose behind the innovation
For the foreseeable future, firefighters will still be on the ground when communities are threatened, and pilots will still fly aircraft into difficult environments to support them. Our responsibility is to give those people every advantage we reasonably can.
A better suppression product might help a line hold. A passive sensor might reveal fire movement that someone cannot see. Better information might buy a crew another minute to make a decision.
After a career in this industry, it is difficult to view those improvements as abstract measures of performance.
“We know who is in those aircraft. We know who is underneath them.”
If something we develop helps them accomplish the mission more effectively, operate within a safer margin, or someday helps one person come home who otherwise might not have, the effort will have been worth it.
Author biography
Stu Sprung is Vice President of EmberWorks, Coulson Aviation’s technology division, and the former Chief of Flight Operations/Chief Pilot for CAL FIRE. He spent nearly a decade in senior aviation leadership with CAL FIRE, overseeing flight operations for the world’s largest civil aerial firefighting fleet. His work included leading CAL FIRE’s C-130H airtanker programme and statewide night helitanker operations, helping bring the agency’s first intelligence aircraft into service, and overseeing major aviation programmes, operational policy, training, and safety.
Today, his work with EmberWorks focuses on developing and bringing new aerial firefighting technologies into operational use. Sprung has more than 35 years of California fire service experience and is a dual-rated FAA Airline Transport Pilot with experience across more than 60 aircraft models, including the C-130H Hercules, Boeing 737, UH-1H Super Huey, and OV-10A Bronco. He is also a California State Fire Marshal-certified Fire Officer and Instructor, and holds a B.A. in Economics from the University of California, San Diego, along with A.S. degrees in Chemistry and Biology.
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