A U.S. Senator Pushed to Cut Firefighting Aircraft Inspections the Same Month His Former Company Failed One

A little over a year ago, Sen. Tim Sheehy floated an audacious proposal to reshape the way the federal government fights wildfires. It called for expanding the use of private planes and helicopters to quickly attack blazes while also eliminating the U.S. Forest Service’s rigorous airworthiness inspections for those aircraft.

The idea stood to benefit Sheehy, a Montana Republican, personally. Before running for Congress, he founded and ran an aerial firefighting company called Bridger Aerospace, which is known for its scoopers, aircraft built to retrieve water from lakes or oceans and drop it onto fires. Since 2021, the Forest Service has paid Bridger more than $235 million for use of its scoopers, according to public records.

Sheehy’s ownership of Bridger is well known, but what hasn’t been reported is that the same month the proposal leaked, a Forest Service inspector had discovered a crack in a wing of an aircraft Bridger had presented as ready for service. The scooper had failed the very inspection Sheehy sought to eliminate. 

Forest Service inspectors have flagged problems with Bridger’s scoopers for years, according to sources and documents obtained by ProPublica under the Freedom of Information Act. The records were heavily redacted by the agency, including the problem that the inspector discovered last April. But a former government official with direct knowledge of the inspection told ProPublica it had revealed a crack in a wing. “It was a big crack,” the official said. Other experts said that kind of finding is rare and could have proved catastrophic.

“Very seldom do you find a crack in a major component,” said Paul Markowitz, a former national aviation maintenance manager for the Forest Service. Detecting such problems is the reason the Forest Service operates an airworthiness program, he added: “It’s to keep people alive.”

Veteran fire officials noted that Sheehy’s proposals would eliminate costly oversight of the company he founded and others like it while increasing spending on aerial firefighting. At the time the document leaked, he owned Bridger stock worth between $13 million and $15 million.

Within the Forest Service, the company was known to resist oversight, officials told ProPublica. Five current and former Forest Service officials say Bridger Aerospace has chafed at the agency’s rigorous inspections, even as records and sources indicate the company has presented aircraft in need of maintenance and repairs as ready to fight fires. The sources asked not to be named for fear of reprisal.

Bridger did not answer questions about the failed inspection but said in a statement, “Safety is the bedrock of our company, and we spare no expense.” It added, “Our investment in maintenance and training runs into the tens of millions annually and reflects the high safety standard we believe this work demands.”

Bridger’s aircraft have never been involved in a crash, according to records maintained by the National Transportation Safety Board. 

Sheehy’s office did not respond to interview requests. But he has been open about his frustration with the Forest Service’s inspections and contended that Bridger’s scoopers, because they are built to fight fire, require less oversight than other firefighting aircraft that were originally designed for other purposes. 

In response to detailed questions about Sheehy’s role in reshaping the fire service, a spokesperson for the senator said he stands by his efforts to eliminate Forest Service inspections. The process is “a relic of a bygone era and has become an unnecessary barrier to asset availability,” the spokesperson said in an email. The spokesperson also said that Sheehy has no conflict of interest because he has since moved his assets into blind trusts, adding, “The senator will continue to be adversarial toward anyone protecting a broken status quo that has allowed cities to burn to the ground.”

Former Forest Service officials say it’s common for companies to complain about inspections. What sets Bridger apart is its connection to a senator who is seeking to change how wildfire aviation is managed. A spokesperson for the Department of Agriculture, which oversees the Forest Service, did not answer questions about Sheehy’s relationship with the agency.

Last June, President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing agencies to consolidate their wildland fire programs, an idea Sheehy and others have long favored. The order left Forest Service inspections in place. But as fire officials discuss consolidation, an influential industry group that Sheehy helped shape is advocating for ending them.

The United Aerial Firefighters Association was launched in 2022, with Sheehy serving as a founding board member. The group now wants to allow contractors to develop their own inspection standards.

“Industry inspects itself all the time. Industry inspects automobiles. Industry inspects baby formula,” said Tiffany Taylor, UAFA’s senior policy director. “Why can’t we be inspecting ourselves?”

Contractors like Bridger own the vast majority of aircraft that the federal government uses to fight wildfires. In 2022, the last year for which data is available, only 5% of the Forest Service’s flight hours for firefighting came from aircraft it owns. Regardless of their ownership, aircraft must be inspected before flying. That job falls to about 25 aviation safety inspectors, most of whom work for the Forest Service. 

The Federal Aviation Administration certifies aircraft but does not conduct regular inspections. The agency instead relies on companies to ensure their planes and helicopters are airworthy. Even when the FAA performs inspections, fire officials and contractors say, they do not account for the stresses inflicted by steering aircraft through wildfires. “The Forest Service is way more in-depth,” said Britt Coulson, president of Coulson Aviation, a prominent air tanker contractor.

Forest Service officials often say the agency’s rules governing aviation are written in blood. A pair of shocking crashes in 2002 ignited the push for more rigorous inspections. That June, an air tanker was dropping retardant in California when its wings folded upward, like a bird in flight, and detached. The plane burst into flames and fell to the ground. The harrowing moment was caught on video. Three people onboard were killed, and the NTSB later attributed the accident to undetected cracks in one of the plane’s wings. One month later, in Colorado, another tanker contracted by the Forest Service crashed after a wing separated from the fuselage. Two pilots were killed. Once again, the NTSB said the accident was caused by unidentified wing cracking.

Since 2010, when the Forest Service implemented its current airworthiness program, the accident rate for aircraft it owns or contracts has plummeted. Between 1993 and 2010, it reported 85 accidents that killed 63 people — an average of nearly four deaths per year. Between 2011 and 2023, the last year for which data is available, the agency reported just 17 accidents and seven fatalities.

Inspectors examine everything from the fuselage to the altimeter. When they find problems, they require the contractor to make changes before they issue a certifying document known as a card. In a separate procedure, inspectors issue cards to contractors’ pilots.

By 2018, Bridger had a modest fleet of surveillance aircraft, but Sheehy had bigger ambitions. According to Sheehy’s 2023 book, “Mudslingers: A True Story of Aerial Firefighting,” his brother, Matt, a Bridger co-founder, helped connect the company to the Blackstone Group, which invested a reported $150 million. Bridger used the funds to buy six scoopers from Viking Air. Sheehy wrote that the day of the first aircraft’s arrival in 2020 was “among the proudest of my life.”

In his book, he described that aircraft as a “brand new” model CL-415 but according to FAA records and aviation experts, this was inaccurate. The records show Bridger’s first scooper was built in 1985 and that it is in fact a precursor to the CL-415 model. Viking Air is now part of a larger company called De Havilland Aircraft of Canada Limited. A De Havilland spokesperson declined to comment about the aircraft’s age.

Records also show that Bridger’s first scooper had undergone extensive repairs before the company bought it. The skin of the fuselage had cracked from stress, and both wings had been repaired. One repair, done in 2012, fixed a crack in the left spar — a load-bearing beam extending outward from the fuselage. Experts say any repair to a wing spar is significant. “A spar is what’s holding the damn thing together,” said Markowitz. 

According to Sheehy’s account, in 2020, the Forest Service’s airworthiness chief at the time, John Nelson, insisted that Bridger’s scoopers meet an updated standard of maintenance and inspection. Sheehy was extremely upset. “Unfortunately, the relationship between industry and the USFS Airworthiness Branch is at an all-time low,” he wrote in his book. (Nelson did not respond to questions about Sheehy’s characterization.)

The next year, Bridger’s first scoopers received cards, allowing the government to pay for their use.

By 2023, the company had six contracted scoopers. Inspectors soon found more problems with the aircraft, according to the records. In January 2024, Bridger presented its first scooper as ready for service, only to have a Forest Service inspector find issues with the engine and electronics. The problems and reasons for the failed inspection were redacted in documents obtained by ProPublica. The scooper received its card the next month.

According to experts who examined the Bridger inspection records at ProPublica’s request, these issues are common in the aerial firefighting fleet. But they said it’s extraordinary for inspectors to find a problem like the one identified last spring.

In early April 2025, Bridger presented two scoopers for carding, saying they were ready for service. During one of these assessments, a Forest Service inspector found a crack in a wing.

The Forest Service records show that Bridger completed a repair in Montana by April 18. Within a week, both aircraft had been cleared for flight.

Bridger did not answer specific questions about the repair. In a statement, the company said, “For a 30,000-pound aircraft that skims bodies of water repeatedly at 100 mph to scoop 11,700 pounds of water in 12 seconds, regular maintenance and periodic repairs are an inherent part of the job.” The company added, “We welcome the rigorous certification process.”

But the relatively quick repair was not a reflection of the severity of the issue. Gil Elmy, a former Forest Service official who wrote the agency’s aircraft inspector guide, said such a finding “should not happen.” Markowitz said the finding evoked an uncomfortable historical echo. The 2002 crash, which was caught on camera and precipitated the Forest Service’s reckoning and its modern airworthiness program, was caused by unidentified wing cracking.

As Bridger’s scooper was being repaired, officials in the wildland fire community were responding to a proposal from the senator’s office that would have ended the airworthiness program. In March 2025, Sheehy asked Brooke Rollins, the secretary of the Department of Agriculture, to stop the inspections, and in mid-April, a draft executive order that proposed eliminating them leaked from his Senate office. Metadata showed the draft had been edited by one of Sheehy’s policy advisers at the time as well as a lobbyist for Bridger. The United Aerial Firefighting Association also shaped the draft.

“Senator Sheehy’s office circulated a living, breathing document to members of congress, outside policy experts, and industry stakeholders on ways to improve the way we fight fire in this country,” wrote Sheehy’s spokesperson.

When Sheehy resigned from Bridger in July 2024 to run for the Senate, he owned 21% of the company, making him its largest individual shareholder. Four months after taking office, in May 2025, he moved most of his stock into two revocable blind trusts, claiming they eliminated any conflict of interest he might have.

But the trusts appear to be managed by executives at Tallgrass, an energy infrastructure company that until March was run by Sheehy’s brother, Matt, who was also a significant early investor in Bridger. Neither Matt Sheehy nor representatives for Tallgrass responded to questions about the trusts. In an email, a spokesperson for the senator did not dispute the Tallgrass executives’ stewardship but pointed out that the Senate Select Committee on Ethics had vetted the trusts. The spokesperson wrote, “Senator Sheehy’s blind trusts are completely independent — he has no control over them.”

According to Cynthia Brown, senior ethics counsel at the nonprofit Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a decision to entrust stock to such close associates undermines the purpose of a blind trust, which is to ensure that a lawmaker’s investments are independently managed. In an email, Brown said, “Selecting a family member’s company appears to do that exact thing that the rules mean to prohibit.”

Since last spring, Sheehy has said little about airworthiness inspections. But he has pushed other policies that would increase business opportunities for aviation companies, such as requiring a response within 30 minutes to all wildfires on federal land. At the same time, he has driven an agenda that could debilitate his longtime foe, the Forest Service.

In statements, on podcasts and in the New York Times opinion section, he has advocated for a single national fire service. And at almost every turn — including in proposed legislation — he has insisted that the Forest Service’s vast wildfire apparatus be moved within the Department of the Interior’s smaller operation. It would hollow out the Forest Service, which draws more than half its budget from fire operations. “It would be a fatal wound,” said Doug Crandall, the agency’s former legislative affairs director.

There are inefficiencies in a fire aviation system spread between agencies. The rush for a couple dozen inspectors to certify hundreds of planes and helicopters before wildfire season can cause delays, temporarily grounding aircraft and cutting into contractors’ revenues. And the agencies have sometimes required duplicative inspections. 

But even officials and firefighting labor advocates who support consolidation, which requires congressional approval, have questioned why Interior should absorb the Forest Service’s fire program. Some liken it to forcing a minnow to swallow a whale. The Forest Service employs about twice as many full-time wildland firefighters as the Interior Department, and it spends at least three times more on aviation contracting. It is also responsible for the vast majority of inspections. According to a recent organizational chart reviewed by ProPublica, only five aviation safety inspectors currently work for the Interior Department.

Bridger carries significant debt and in 2024 warned shareholders that it had “substantial doubt about our ability to continue as a going concern.” But last year, the company reported a profit for the first time since going public. It also purchased two more scoopers and predicted that efforts to unify fire agencies “could increase contracting opportunities for private aerial providers.” In another recent filing, Bridger said, “the legislative and policy environment has never been more aligned with our mission.”

Last year, six Forest Service aviation safety inspectors resigned or retired, according to the agency. The recent organizational chart reviewed by ProPublica shows the same number of positions remain unfilled, representing more than 20% of Forest Service aviation safety inspector jobs. It’s unclear what would happen to the rest of the inspectors if the Interior Department were to absorb the Forest Service’s fire operations. In an emailed statement, Adam Mendonca, the Forest Service’s deputy director of fire and aviation management, said the agency “has no intention to change our aircraft inspection standards,” adding that it was “working closely with the Department of the Interior to streamline aviation operations.”

In late March, the Forest Service announced a dramatic reorganization that will move its headquarters to Salt Lake City. The Department of Agriculture reiterated the administration’s desire to fold the Forest Service’s fire operations into the Interior Department.

By that point, blazes had ignited in the Midwest. With the arrival of fire season, the Forest Service’s airworthiness inspectors performed their close examinations. At hangars across the country, they looked for cracks.