Two helicopter pilots are dead after their aircraft crashed Sunday while dropping water on the Dome Fire in Yosemite National Park — the latest casualties in a fire season that has now killed at least 14 people, the most since 2022.
The pilots, employed by aerospace contractor Precision, were working with a helitack crew that rappels into terrain no one can reach on foot. Their Eurocopter AS32 went down just before 3 p.m. southeast of Ostrander Lake, roughly nine miles south of El Capitan. Precision confirmed both crew members died, calling the loss "devastating." The FAA and the National Transportation Safety Board are investigating.
The Dome Fire has scorched more than 3,000 acres since it ignited Sept. 15 near Wawona in Mariposa County. Roughly 580 personnel are on the blaze, which is 15% contained.
Here is what neither outlet wants to say plainly: these men died fighting a fire that decades of government mismanagement made inevitable. Environmentalist lobbying killed controlled burns. Bureaucratic red tape strangled logging. The result is millions of acres of overgrown, fuel-choked forest — a tinderbox that burns hotter, faster, and deadlier than it ever had to.
Even the reporting accidentally confirms it. The New York Post noted that the Dome Fire "has reached areas previously burned by other wildfires, including the 2017 Empire Fire, where less vegetation has contributed to reduced fire behavior." Less vegetation means less fire. That is not complicated. Yet the same agencies that acknowledge this reality in the field continue enforcing policies that prevent the logging and prescribed burns that would reduce vegetation before the fire starts.
The Guardian, for its part, framed the danger as a staffing problem under the Trump administration, writing that "the Trump administration has increased pressure on firefighting forces, amid a critical shortage of federal firefighters." Blame the current president, not the decades of green policy that made the fires unmanageable. The shortage is real. The question nobody in the press asks is whether the federal government's own forest management created a crisis so large that no number of firefighters can contain it.
Fourteen dead so far this year. Three firefighters killed in Colorado's Knowles Fire, plus a fourth who succumbed to injuries weeks later — the deadliest entrapment in 13 years. The job has always been dangerous. But the scale of these fires, and the danger they pose to the people fighting them, is a policy choice. Controlled burns work. Thinning works. The Forest Service's own research says so. What stands in the way is a regulatory apparatus and an environmental lobby that treats every tree as sacred and every chainsaw as a sin.
Two more Americans are dead. The investigation into the crash will look at the helicopter. Who will investigate the policies that put that helicopter over a 3,000-acre inferno in the first place?
