John Henderson, owner of Henderson Aviation, stands next to one of his two helicopters in Redmond. Henderson said he has decided against retrofitting his helicopters to comply with new safety requirements the Forest Service has adopted for its contract helicopters.

U.S. Forest Service officials are unsure how many privately owned helicopters they will be able to enlist to fight fires in the Northwest this summer and fall because of delays in the contracting process.

Jennifer Jones, a spokeswoman with the Forest Service National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, said her office has fallen behind in “carding” aircraft, an inspection process required before a privately owned helicopter can be certified as airworthy.

One aspect of the slowed inspections is the new and costly safety requirements the Forest Service has adopted for its contract helicopters. The new standards require a number of pieces of equipment, the most costly of which is a wire strike kit, a series of blade-like attachments that can save a helicopter if it flies into a phone or power line. Fully retrofitting a helicopter to meet the standards could cost up to $50,000.

The safety standards apply to all helicopters the Forest Service contracts for, but are new this year for those that are hired through a “call-when-needed” contract.

Call-when-needed contracts are issued only on the smallest of the three sizes of helicopters the Forest Service hires.

The Type IIIs, as they’re known, can carry fewer firefighters and less water or retardant than the larger Type II and Type I models.

As the name suggests, call-when-needed helicopters are used as a reserve force, supplementing the aircraft the Forest Service keeps under exclusive-use contracts. Exclusive-use helicopters are fewer in number — nationwide, the Forest Service has 60 Type III helicopters on exclusive-use contracts, 41 Type IIs and 26 Type Is, all of which are rotated around the country during the fire season.

Last year, during the final year of a now-expired three-year contract for call-when-needed helicopters in Oregon and Washington, the Forest Service had 37 carded, Jones said, out of a total of 54 helicopters under contract. This year — and for the next three years — there are 41 under contract, and it’s unknown how many will be allowed to fly.

Some in the helicopter business contend the Forest Service could be lacking air support if the fire season heats up later in the summer.

John Henderson, owner of Henderson Aviation in Junction City and Redmond, said he decided against retrofitting his helicopters in order to apply for a call-when-needed contract. Henderson said the standards themselves are not unreasonable for firefighting helicopters, just costly, as the call-when-needed contract doesn’t guarantee a helicopter owner will get a call to go to work on a fire.

Mark Gibson of Timberland Logging in Ashland said he expects to have three helicopters carded to fly under call-when-needed contracts this summer, He’s not sure how many private owners will choose to upgrade their helicopters — aside from the cost, installing the newly required equipment will take anywhere from 40 to 80 hours, he said. Further, the rush to get the work completed in time for the fire season has created a greater demand for wire strike kits than the few companies that make such products can meet, he said.

Gibson said he can’t recall a single instance of a firefighting helicopter going down after striking wires in Oregon or Washington, but more importantly, the equipment is hard to justify if helicopter owners don’t get an opportunity to recoup the investment.

“Our whole issue from the beginning was that the Forest Service has been telling us for several years that their intention has been to use fewer and fewer call-when-needed assets, and at the same time over the years they continue to increase the requirements on those call-when-needed assets,” Gibson said.

Jones conceded the cost of the additional equipment could deter some helicopter owners from participating in the call-when-needed pool, and that two slow fire years in a row have pushed down the amount of money spent on call-when-needed contractors. In 2010, the Forest Service spent $609,000 on call-when-needed contractors in Oregon and Washington, down from $1.1 million the year before and $2.6 million in 2008.

The sluggish economy has driven some helicopter operators out of business since the last contracting period three years ago, Jones said, while others have found new opportunities in surveying or logging or other helicopter-dependent industries.

Jones said it will be a few more weeks before the Forest Service will know how many helicopters will be available. The new standards are appropriate even if the size of the call-when-needed fleet is reduced, she said. Were they not to require a particular piece of equipment and a preventable crash were to occur, people would ask why the equipment wasn’t required.

Fire incident commanders will adjust their firefighting strategy to match the resources available to them, Jones said, and a diminished helicopter fleet shouldn’t undermine fire-suppression capabilities.