MUDSLINGERS - the Book
Tim Sheehy, combat veteran, aerial firefighter, entrepreneur, and avid historian, shares his thoughts on his new book,
Mudslingers: A True Story of Aerial Firefighting.
Watch the full episode :
Tim discusses why he decided to write a book about the history of Aerial Firefighting.
This is Tim Sheehy. Welcome to Tim Said podcast.
This is Tim Sheehy and the Tim Said podcast.
Today, I'm excited to say my book, Mudslingers - A True Story of Aerial Firefighting just got delivered. First hardcopy versions. I'm proud of it. 100% of the proceeds from this book go to benefit the aerial firefighting community. Most of them will go to fallen aerial firefighters’ families. You know, as an example in the military, if you're killed, or wounded in action, your family gets an immediate insurance policy payout and lots of benefits associated with that. If you're a government employee fighting fires, there's a similar structure. Not as good as the military, I'll be the first to say, but in place to take care of you and your family. If you're a civilian aerial firefighting pilot, unfortunately, that's not the case. If you're injured or killed in the line of duty, you are serving your country or serving your community. A lot of times there's not a whole lot of assistance available for those families immediately.
The Montana Firefighter Fund and the Wildland Firefighter Foundation are two organizations that exist out there to immediately help the families of wildland firefighters. Both ground and air in the immediate aftermath of a family catastrophe. Also, some proceeds will go to the United Aerial Firefighters Association. It's the first association that's been formed by all the aerial firefighting companies to advocate for safer standardization, higher standards of technology with their aircraft and more consistent contracting language. So those organizations benefit from Mudslingers.
Check those links below to learn about those organizations and benefit them.
What this book talks about are the history of aerial firefighting in North America. It's a fascinating story. I didn't know anything about aerial firefighting when I got into it. I started our company in 2014 after I got out of the military. I got injured as a SEAL. I had been a pilot since I was a kid and wanted to form a company that took the aerial surveillance capability and close air support model.
That was really lifesaving for me and my teams overseas and applied it to tasks outside of war.
Although wildland fire wasn't at the top of that list, we ended up getting into that industry kind of by accident. And I immediately fell in love with it. Love the mission. I love the people.
As I learned more about it, I realized the history of it was just fascinating. And no one had necessarily put it on paper in a consolidated way. We had so many colorful characters, you know, throughout American aerial firefighting and Canadian aerial firefighting. They just had amazing stories to tell. I felt like someone had to tell it.
In the summer 2021, I had a lot of flight duty that year. COVID was still going on. Air crews moving around, and it was tough. It was a big fire year. So, I was in the field a lot flying our super scoopers. There's time where you're sitting waiting to launch. So, I just started to write, and I started to talk to people, started to talk to other pilots, other operators, base managers and just reading. Realized that, you know, as I was just writing this history down, just ad lib as it came out, there was a pretty cool story here. And that's when I decided, by the end of that summer, I was going to try to take some of that and put it into a book. Not for myself, not to make money, but really because I wanted to share that story with more Americans.
So few Americans really understand the sacrifices made to protect them and the wildland fire
realm. They don't realize that the apparatus that exists to protect them if they're farm or ranches is burning, if they're caught camping or fishing up in the mountains in this wildfire raging their way, if their home is in a wildfire prone area, there are hundreds and thousands of people that are highly trained and highly equipped to be ready to protect you and your land.
The ground aspect of this has been told a little bit more. The aerial aspect and the lineage of that is pretty amazing, especially when you start going back in the early days and seeing some of the aircraft coming out of the World War Two, the Korean War, how they were converted for fire.
and the individuals that did it. You know, some of these swashbuckling early barnstorming pilots,
pretty impressive to learn about that and see what they were doing. Our friends in Canada made a great trip up to the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources and the and the Canadian Bush Plane Museum up there in Sault Ste Marie. And you see some of the early firefighting planes, the spotting planes, the early tankers that they used in the scoopers. It's just an amazing story. And I feel privileged to be a part of that community.
When I wrote this book, it's not my story. It's not a story that belongs to me, which is why I'm donating the proceeds to the community, because it really is a story about the community.
Unfortunately, I can't tell every bit of history. I can't tell every single person’s story. I wish I could, but, our book would be too long and I don't think anybody would read it. So, we tried to get the high points of the industry of its history and condense it into a digestible format. Obviously, my story is a bit woven in just because I did write it. It's a first-person perspective I think that that adds a little bit of through thread to the story.
A couple of key excerpts from this that I want to make sure I talk about. You'll see in some of these, you know, I've got historical photos that were generously lent to me by the Canadian Bushplane Heritage Center up in Ontario in Sault Ste. Marie. And they show some of the early aerial firefighting aircraft that they innovated. Literally float planes with metal cylinders with a top cut out of them, and you pull a cord from the cockpit, and they'd just roll sideways, called roll tanks. And that didn’t last a super long time. But you know how they started out doing that, it's pretty cool. And then you start looking at some of the spotter planes of the 1920s that were flying all through the forests in Canada and using those float planes because of all the lakes up there, they didn't even have runways. So, basing everything on the water was some of the lineage of today's more modern sea planes and float planes, which they're not many. The float plane and sea plane industry kind of faded a long time ago. But seeing that is pretty powerful and of course, taking us all the way up to today where we have, you know, very advanced, you know, full on, airline aircraft like the DC-10, which is, you know, the largest aero firefighting plane in the world right now, is just a beast. And that thing can lay down, you know, a line of retardant, 10,000 gallons of it literally can box in a whole fire in a couple of drops of it has to.
Seeing how far the industry has come, but most importantly, recognizing a lot of the sacrifices that happened early in the industry of people innovating, you know, barnstorming, designing things on the fly sometimes. Obviously, it didn't always work out. A lot of crashes, lot of structural failures as the industry started understanding, you know, really how to engineer those products to be safe and effective over the target. We talk about that, talk about some of the hotbeds of innovation. Of course, you had, Hemet, California, Grass Valley, California, Ontario, Sault Ste, Marie up in Ontario, Canada. You know, those areas are some of the hotbeds of early innovation, and North American aerial firefighting.
Some side stories there as well. We talked about some of the aviation missions that were related to aero firefighting. Like the missionaries, in the fifties and sixties, there was a lot of a blending of missions. And some of our early bush plane pioneers that were very important to aerial firefighting were also missionary pilots in South America flying some of the similar aircraft that we used here, you know, taking missionaries down to very, very remote airstrips and operating in austere conditions.
I Didn't talk much about Europe, although Europe's got a very robust and heroic aerial firefighting capability as well. This book is just focused on primarily U.S. and Canadian firefighting stories and how those came to be.
it's really cool to see the book in hardcopy. You know, I've been writing it in my free time for years now. I hope folks buy it not because I'm going to get the money, but it will support the area firefighting community. But most importantly, I want to get the story of Aerial firefighters out there.
It's the community's story and I hope people enjoy it.
The book is available for preorder at Barnes & Noble, and Amazon.com will be available on December 12th. If it isn't in your local bookstore, make sure to ask for it.
Mudslingers: A True Story of Aerial Firefighting
You'll see the subtitle An American Origin Story. I love this country. I'm a proud American.
We've had some amazing innovations come out of America. We've had some amazing stories that this country has been the birthplace for. This is one of those. I have a couple other book ideas I'm also writing, those will fall into the same category of amazing historical inventions, whether they be economic evolutions, whether they be technological advancements, whether they be industries like this that America has given birth to that have changed the world. And I try to tell those stories under the banner of the American Origin Stories.
To purchase the book:
Amazon Pre-order (this is an affiliates link: All proceeds will go to the organizations below)
Book proceeds go to:
Wildland Firefighter Foundation
United Aerial Firefighters Association
If you chance, please visit the: Canadian Bushplane Heritage Centre
