A new online reporting tool has been developed for CFA Aviation by the CFA Bushfire Management Research and Development team.
The Air Attack Supervisor (AAS) Operational Reports are used to collect information in relation to fire properties and operational aircraft suppression information and effectiveness to improve the measurement of the impact of aircraft usage.
Previously they were paper-based and required the information be manually recorded by Air Attack Supervisors and sent by mail to be recorded manually onto a database if staffing allowed.
This program is linked with the National Aerial Firefighting Centre’s ARENA flight event and dispatch recording system APIs.
A post-event web reporting tool has been developed for CFA Aviation by the CFA Bushfire Management Research and Development team to allow AAS to search for incident and aircraft dispatch and aircraft fill/drop information, collate suppression effectiveness and impact data against the dispatch and single/multiple aircraft drops to form electronic reports.
The captured data is stored in a central database to support data analysis and statistics.
This tool has been in trial since February 2021 and will be used by all participating Victorian fire agencies in 2021-22 season and there has also been interest from interstate organisations.
In the meantime, a tablet-based live reporting app is being developed by the team to allow AAS to collate the data onboard the aircraft and will be trialled during the 2021-22 fire season.