Starting in 2025, the Honolulu Fire Department will fly a new twin-engine helicopter to incidents ranging from searches and rescues to fighting wildland fires across not only Oahu, but perhaps to the other islands as well.
On Thursday HFD unveiled its new Bell 429, which adds to the three 1990s-era single-engine copters the Fire Department has been flying for decades.
Besides being a twin- engine, the more than $10.6 million Bell 429 will fly faster and travel farther — with a maximum speed of 170 mph and a range per flight of 450 miles, according to the manufacturer — than HFD’s current trio of white-and-yellow McDonnell Douglas 520N helicopters.
“This aircraft truly represents a long-term investment of our city and the safety and well-being of our community,” said Fire Chief Sheldon K. Hao during a news conference at HFD’s hangar at Kalaeloa Airport in Kapolei. “I’m truly excited that this aircraft will become an immediate asset to our air operations.”
Hao said the new helicopter — which will require advanced training for HFD’s stable of six full-time pilots — will be fully operational by June.
He said the aircraft’s “twin-engine capabilities will increase efficiency and the capacity, which is essential for reaching remote areas, supporting firefighting efforts and conducting search and rescue operations.”
“This is truly not just a replacement, but it’s a significant upgrade to our current fleet,” Hao said. “Our plan is to slowly transition over time to have only a fleet of twin-engine helicopters, because it’s a much safer platform for our personnel to operate on and it’s just going to provide a better service to the community.”
Dustin Harris, HFD’s senior helicopter pilot, said the new Bell 429 is safer to fly because it has two engines.
“It’s essentially double the horsepower, and that gives us a huge increase in capacity and capability for the helicopter and a safety margin,” Harris said, noting if there’s a malfunction the helicopter can fly on one engine “to make sure that flight crews and passengers can get back to base safely.”
And with both engines working the Bell 429 has a greater ability to lift things — specifically, water-filled buckets that are used to combat wildfires from above.
“The more we can lift, the more water we can carry,” Harris said. “The water buckets for this helicopter are going to be 260 gallons per bucket as opposed to 96 gallons for the buckets we operate for the current fleet.
“So that’s almost three times the amount of water per drop,” he added. “And as you can imagine, if you put three times the amount of water on a fire in the same span of time, that’s going to greatly impact our ability to quickly control and manage wildfires.”
He said the twin-engine copter’s design also assists in search and rescue operations.
“It just gives us more power margins when we’re operating, especially in the mountainous areas here on Oahu,” Harris said. “That’s actually a really difficult environment to operate helicopters in because of the strong, changing winds and how they interact with the mountains.”
Harris said he personally flew the new helicopter from Bell Textron Inc.’s factory in Piney Flats, Tenn., through multiple states — including over the Rocky Mountains in Colorado — to the Los Angeles area, where the aircraft was loaded aboard an oceangoing container ship bound for Honolulu.
“A range of altitudes, different conditions and the controllability and the power that come from having the twin engines and the tail rotor that the aircraft has on it are really amazing from a pilot’s standpoint,” he said of the three-day journey to California. “We were cruising across the country with a ground speed of close to 160 mph most of the time.”
Harris noted the Bell 429 comes with an integrated rescue hoist — a feature absent from the department’s current choppers.
“The simplest way to put it is it’s a mechanical tool that’s not going to just allow us to lower rescuers down to victims in the mountains or in the water, but actually bring them back up into the helicopter,” Harris said.
He added that the new copter has a much larger cabin than those found inside an MD 520N.
“If you’ve seen us do rescues with the rest of our fleet, you might see a rescuer go down a line, if you’re hiking on Koko Head or somewhere up in the Koolaus, but when we fly away that person remains suspended under the aircraft, hanging on a rope, and they have to stay there,” he said. “We don’t have any way to bring them back into the helicopter until we have a place to set them down and land.”
“As you might imagine, it is much safer to ride inside of a helicopter than hanging on a rope underneath one,” Harris added.
The city budgeted $12 million to purchase the new Bell 429 but spent $10.6 million, according to Hao.
HFD spends about $2 million annually to maintain its aging helicopter fleet, he said.
Although Hao said obtaining HFD’s newest helicopter was years in the making, the Bell 429’s addition follows the Aug. 8, 2023, Maui wildfire disaster.
It also followed Oahu’s own wildfire, which caused worries in West Oahu a year ago this week, in the rugged mountains east of Mililani Mauka.
In 2023, starting on Oct. 30 and lasting until Nov. 7, HFD did battle with a wildland blaze that began as a small reported brush fire.
That wildfire, which initially scorched 300 acres but eventually blackened almost 1,700 acres of largely rugged, steep ridge lines, was deemed inaccessible to firefighters on the ground.
To battle this blaze, HFD’s aviation program of three MD 520N helicopters — nearing the end of their useful service lives — were brought to bear, days before the wildfire was squelched by a spate of heavy rainfall.
But according to HFD Battalion Chief Robert Thurston, who leads the department’s aviation wing, it was the assistance from the Army, Hawaii Air National Guard and state Division of Forestry and Wildlife, among others, which bombarded the blaze from above with successive airborne water drops, that kept the Mililani Mauka fire contained.
According to Hao, his department’s investigation into the origins of the Mililani Mauka blaze has officially closed, though the fire’s cause remains “undetermined.”
