14
Seven hours.
Carly threw herself down on the grassy bank between the drone’s launch trailer and the smooth-flowing Payette. Her body thrummed with exhaustion as if she’d been fighting the fire on the ground. Three hours in transit and seven hours over the fire until the sunset had shut down flight operations. Forest Service prohibited air-attack from thirty minutes before sunset until thirty after sunrise.
There were exceptions—the Firehawk and one of MHA’s tankers were night rated. The problem was that the personnel contracts called for ten hours consecutive downtime for the pilot out of every twenty-four hours. A one-flight call at midnight would delay the next morning’s attack until after ten a.m. So, if there were no emergencies, they were done for the night, which in midsummer w
