Hey, hi everyone. My name is Austin Moeller. I'm the Aerospace and Defense Analyst here at Canaccord Genuity, and today we are joined by Sam Davis and Eric Gerratt, CEO and CFO of Bridger Aerospace Group . I guess, did you just want to go through a slide first and give a brief intro on the company for those that aren't familiar?
Would love to do that real quick, and I'll keep it brief. Up on the screen, you could see an overview of Bridger Aerospace. We're headquartered in Bozeman, Montana, and we're an aerial firefighting company. We were founded in 2014. We have three main service offerings. We do suppression on fires with our super scoopers, which you can see on the screen. We do aerial surveillance for detection and surveillance over fires, and we also provide in-house engineering for modification of aircraft that we use in-house and in the defense sector. We have a growing demand year-over-year with wildfires seen all across the nation. We've seen fires this year, unfortunately, in Palisades, which grabbed national headlines. We were there to fight those fires. All the way to the East Coast, we fought fires in Tennessee. Even Boston, you guys see smoke here quite frequently now.
The rising demand in wildfires has necessitated aviation assets that are very scarce, and Bridger has a unique opportunity to not only meet that demand, but to continue to grow and acquire these aircraft, and get them into the market quickly to fill the unfulfilled demand orders out there. We have attractive economics, as you can imagine. We find the increase in duration of contracts and multi-year contracts that we've been able to influence with our assets, both with legislation and obviously with the public scrutiny that happens with these fires so that our assets are being used more effectively as initial attack for pre-positioning, and being in the place to be most effective for how they're built. I'll just let you take it off to questions.
All right. How do you view your fleet of super scooper aerial firefighting planes today, and how do they compare to other aerial firefighting solutions like helicopters or C-130s equipped with MAS or chemical retardants?
Right, yeah. We call our air, you know, all airframes for firefighting are tools in the toolbox. There's aircraft that drop retardant and aircraft that drop water for suppression. Retardant is a perimeter; it forms a line that slows the progression and diverts fire from going into areas that it's not meant to. Water is the most effective direct attack, or initial attack, tool to suppress flames and slow the progression of fire. With helicopters and with scoopers, we can drop water on fire. Helicopters, as you can imagine, are very concentrated, very effective for dropping directly on structures, preventing neighborhoods from burning, and so on. Scoop ers are specifically designed to repeatedly scoop and drop water and drop hundreds of thousands of gallons of water a day, because they only need a couple of fuel cycles to last a day.
Depending on the distance from a body of water, scoopers are extremely effective in positioning all over the country to deploy on nearby fires, and they only need about a mile of open water. The retardant-based fixed-wing aircraft are all tankers, and they need to land at an airport that not only is a big enough airport for them to land at, but fill with a hose at a tanker base to fill with retardant. We're way more versatile and effective, and in my mind, you know, it performs a different mission than retardant-based planes or helicopters. We differentiate very strongly from the other tools out there. Of the scoopers, we have six of the 10 in the U.S., so there's only 10 total. That's where Bridger saw a unique opportunity to bring them into the U.S.
The CL-series "super scooper" aircraft or the scooper aircraft are used worldwide, but have never been a staple or a household name in the U.S. until we really made it more of an expanded fleet here.
Can you discuss the size of your super scooper fleet versus the total number of that airplane type in North America and in Europe?
Yeah, great question. I just alluded to it. We have six here in the U.S. There were only roughly around 220 Canadian CL aircraft made, the scoopers. Of that variant, roughly 110 of them, or I think it was 150 actually, were turbine versions, which is the more modern version. It's our belief that right around 100 worldwide are only operational. Of those 100, there's only 10 that are privately owned. You can just see the filter gets down to us owning six of the 10. We could talk about it, I'm sure, in a minute, but there are four in Spain that became available that Bridger is helping to manage the return to service to bring those into the private sector as well.
Generally, a huge issue with scarcity and a growing need for, and demand for, this platform specifically has never really existed in the private space, which is where we saw a unique entry point and we've really seen the demand, or the aircraft themselves, are increasing the demand as we grow.
On that point about the Spanish scoopers, what can you tell us about the upgrade work that's being undertaken on the Spanish scoopers as part of the MAB Funding agreement? Could you go into a little bit more detail on that?
Yeah, so two of the four aircraft over there are airworthy. The third one is a few weeks away from getting its airworthiness certification. The fourth aircraft should be ready, I would say, early 2026. Timelines have moved a little bit as we've mostly solved around engine overhauls and finding the right parts because of, again, the scarcity of the airframe out in the market. The management and return to service has gone really well. You and I have talked about, Austin, the demand in Europe. You could see Greece is grabbing headlines today with the fires going on. France has been. We believe there's quite a bit of demand, and I still think the first two airworthy aircraft will get worked this season.
As you can imagine, with this not even being a model in Europe, in terms of company-owned, company-operated, there has to be a lot of groundwork done for the appropriation cycle to get these on contract. Right now, the entry point there is under emergency funding with aircraft that are disappearing from service over there. There have been a few incidents, unfortunately, that have happened this season. The public is now seeing CLs are available. Bridger, the Marathon Avenue Bridger agreement has provided these opportunities for these scoopers to serve in the European market. I think it's just getting that message out there and getting the vehicle to get them work, similar to what they've done in the U.S.
Last week you reported earnings. How has the execution by your team during this latest fire season compared to the performance during previous normal fire seasons and also very active fire seasons?
Yeah, good question. Last year, I would say 2024 was a good base year for Bridger in the fact that 2023 we had all six scoopers fully operational. It was our first full year of operations, but it was an anomaly year because it was the slowest fire season in 25 years in the lower 48. Canada was blowing up and we worked in Canada, but the provincial rates are much less than here in the U.S. 2024 for us was the first year where we hit our stride in terms of utilization and couldn't have been more proud of the team. We had a record year. We were out in February and stayed out till November and saw high utilization rates across all of our fleet from surveillance to scoopers. This year, it was the second week of January.
We had a foot of snow on the ground in Bozeman, and we were rolling scoopers out to go to Palisades. It was then we knew that fires are year-round. We need to manage the team, and we had been preparing for year-round activity. That includes even doing maintenance cycles on our fleet to make sure we have aircraft available year-round. The utilization of our fleet is being changed by both public perception of fires being mismanaged, which I remain a little bit quiet on, but I will say that there are often times when fires do not get actively responded to in the time where it's critical. We've seen a huge response from all federal agencies to get onto fires early when it matters, when they can be turned or suppressed.
The beauty of what Bridger does is for all of our aircraft, we are the, I believe, the premier asset for that initial attack, that early response phase where pre-positioned scoopers, for example, can be called up at a moment's notice and put out a fire of 50 acres in an hour or two hours by dropping a few hundred thousand gallons of water. That initial attack, early response mindset is being adopted by the federal government to prevent the next catastrophic event before you have Lahaina or Palisades fire or the Smokehouse Creek fire in Texas, which took out 1.1 million acres in five days. When those fires can be acted on proactively early and our planes and our team can do what they do well, we've seen a huge change in the mindset as the government has put those tools in place.
For example, this year alone, four of our scoopers are on 120-day task orders, meaning they're guaranteed work for 120 days for all four of them, which we've never seen, just so they could be pre-positioned wherever threats are high. I call it, you know, the fire department in the sky. That mentality is really sinking in with their federal government. All that being said, this year seems to be an average or even maybe a little bit below average year for the fire season, but we've never seen more days, more hours in our fleet, and we've never been out earlier. It looks like we might not ever be out later, just because of the mentality shift and how things are being managed.
On that point, can you discuss the accelerated decision-making activity at the Department of the Interior now that an executive order was issued and the Aerial Firefighting Enhancement Act was passed by Congress? How has that improved task order response times to dispatch aircraft, relative to before when it would take days to get an order?
Yeah, so the key point there is these guaranteed daily task orders or multi-year contracts which have the days guaranteed. Once those are guaranteed, we in Bridger don't get a call in Bozeman under a call-needed contract saying, "Hey, do you have an aircraft available?" We're already out in the field under the government control, and they know where there's high threats anywhere from Utah to Arizona of fire danger. Our planes will be pre-positioned. That's the first area that we see major changes, having our assets pre-positioned. The second is how the aircraft are being used, not just for suppression, but for surveillance. They're called up early. They're called up when a fire starts to scoop and drop water immediately to contain a fire when it's 24 acres versus 75,000 acres. An example is the Monroe Canyon fire in Utah right now. Last I checked, it was 75,000 acres.
There are success stories that are happening that I haven't seen happen historically where there was a spot fire that was in a canyon over that could have become the next Monroe Canyon fire. Our scoopers were on it within 20 minutes and put out 24 acres of fire. News reporters that knew the area and saw what we did were asking me about it. I see that as the evidence of success for that quick deployment and the decisions being made. My last comment there is, especially under the Department of the Interior, with the centralization of wildfire going to that agency, they're much more progressive in their use of technology and in their concept of early response. We've seen already this year three examples where they've been live streaming to the Secretary of the Interior airplane over the Bravo Dragon fire on the Grand Canyon.
Imagery of our camera or our plane flying over that fire to show how effective that command and control is. Also, they're putting out on social media success stories of them intercepting and preventing fire. A very different look and feel from how fires are being managed. Finally, the indications they've been giving to us as a customer about how they're thinking about the years to come, how to pre-position us, how to put more hours on our airframe and add more airframes to our contracts is something that usually doesn't happen until much later in the year and more after appropriations are completely finalized at that point.
Can you discuss the company's recent sale-leaseback of its hangar space and the reduction in its overall leverage by about 25%?
Yeah, sure. Earlier this year, we announced that we'd entered into a sale-leaseback arrangement with the company to purchase our campus in Bozeman. We're located or co-located at the Bozeman International Airport and have brand new hangars, brand new facilities that are pretty state-of-the-art that have appreciated very significantly since we built them. As we looked at this, we looked at it as an opportunity for us to monetize the appreciation in those assets. It's going to be proceeds of about $46 million that we're going to take and, to Austin's point, deleverage our balance sheet and our debt by about 25%. We're going to lease back those facilities.
We have a 10-year lease, a pretty favorable lease for us to continue to remain on those facilities and operate from those facilities, and saw it as an opportunity to kind of leverage some pretty massive appreciation and deleverage our balance sheet.
What can you tell the audience about the recent trends in drying of forest fuels, less snowpack on mountains, and its impact on fire activity, not only in the Mountain West, but also at higher latitudes like in Alaska?
Yeah, that's a great question. I think there's three kind of factors that are exacerbating what we see with wildfires. One is just the general effects of climate change that create hotter, drier conditions year-over-year, more prolonged seasons, and it compounds the forest fuels out there, how fuels dry faster and so on. The second is how we manage or mismanage our forests where we don't do enough preventative work. I'm an outdoorsman. I live in the forest. I wish we did more to clear some of the undergrowth and put bodies on the ground to get rid of some of the old growth problems that we see, which again, they exacerbate the intensity, the duration, and the size of the fires we see, which once they get, you know, to the size that we see with these mega fires, there's literally nothing you can do.
I mean, you could throw every aircraft out there, and sometimes they just move so fast, they'll, you know, they'll jump roads, freeways even. You know, we saw in Palisades where embers were traveling two miles and starting new spot fires. Once things get to that level, it's almost too late. The third and final thing is we see a lot of folks, especially with COVID, moving into what we call the wildland urban interface or the WUI, and that's an industry term, but that's where folks are moving out into these rural areas and everybody wants to be up against the forest or in a forest and creates a lot of problems both with fire starting and then with, you know, what aviation assets have to deal with in terms of preventing homes from getting built rather than just dealing with a fire in the middle of nowhere.
We see that, you know, one of those three things compounding contributes to even more of a greenhouse effect once you see these fires get to the mega status. They put so much carbon into the atmosphere. I think it's on this slide, but one of the fires, I think it was in 2020 in California, put off 140 million metric tons of carbon, something like that, which was more than the entire fleet of California vehicles that year. Once you have that, the atmosphere literally can't break it down to regenerate it. It creates the next year or years to come even more of a climate effect. I think we see that inching its way up into the hemispheres and creating more large fires, drying more fuels, and so on. This is Bridger trying to get ahead of that.
When we can have that initial attack and that early response and suppression, we can really control how big those fires get.
Can you talk a little bit about your multi-mission aircraft and also about the Ignis app and what kinds of data are made available to firefighters from the multi-mission aircraft to the Ignis app?
Yeah, great question. Specifically on our multi-mission aircraft, we have the scoopers that are very in scarcity and high demand, and there's a barrier to entry and a barrier to remain. On the multi-mission aircraft, what we have there is Bridger is uniquely positioned to provide to the customer a system-agnostic solution, whether it's for whatever mission we want to give to them. We have the in-house capabilities to get aircraft, get sensors, and turn them around in record time, whether it's federal or state demands. You could imagine if you want a mission that you could fly and map a large area with what's called a wide area mapping sensor or WAMI versus a gimbal that can zoom in on one rooftop to do command and control. We can provide interchangeability on any configuration out there.
Right now, what we have with our Department of the Interior multi-mission aircraft is we have PC-12s that can cover a large area, but they have interchangeability on their sensor package. We can fly what's called an air attack mission with government officials being able to look at firefighters, do backburns, put out spot fires if you see an ember travel, or we can map an area, a huge area, 250,000 acres in a few hours and detect a thermal signature the size of a basketball from nine miles away that is beneath a forest layer that the human eye might not see for days. The span of what we can do with those multi-mission aircraft is incredible for early detection and then for response during a fire.
What our software does is it takes that imagery and it puts it on a desktop for an incident commander to view a split screen and to see real-time thermal imagery, real-time video, medium, short wave, long wave, infrared, to be able to look through smoke and see where a fire line is, thermal signature of firefighters on the ground to make sure that they're safe, call in suppression so that we're not dropping on firefighters. We're being effective where the flames are, not where the smoke is, and to do that in a way that gives them true situational, real-time situational awareness. It also exists on a mobile app, which exists in little parts and pieces in other software providers out there, but not in the way that we're doing it as a fully integrated solution.
The beautiful part of the Ignis solution that we're going to couple into our aviation contracts is that it allows interactive features for that incident commander. The whole concept for the software through the founder that made it, he was a hotshot that jumped out of helicopters and fought fires on the ground, and he saw disasters of firefighters like the Yarnell fire where firefighters died because they didn't know when direction had changed and nobody could contact them, and they unfortunately perished. He thought, what if I made a mobile app that could notify these firefighters with a repeater nearby that they need to get out, and here is your evacuation route. Literally, the incident commander could draw on their real-time, here's evacuation routes, here's the perimeter, and he could provide the imagery down to those firefighters.
If you went into a fire camp, which I encourage everybody to do, it's interesting, but to this date, you'll see big PDF maps on the wall with pins and pencil drawings of where things are. The problem is, the technology exists to be so disruptive and change how fire is done, and we're the ones that are uniquely positioned to get that into the hands of firefighters. In fact, we believe it's part of our mission to, you know, save lives and property.
Under the Aerial Firefighting Enhancement Act that was passed by Congress, the DOD can now sell old surplus aircraft to private industry for firefighting. If you were to procure aircraft from DOD, what specific aircraft would you be interested in?
Yeah, so same answer for both those questions. Really, that impacts mostly the helicopter market. Most rotorcraft are the most effective former military aircraft to put onto fires, and Bridger does have interest in looking at the rotorcraft market just because, like I explained, those are different tools in the toolbox. They're very effective for spot fires, very effective to protect structures, and you know, a lot of the Type 1 or the heavy helicopters like Blackhawks, Chinooks obviously are military-grade aircraft. That really frees up those operators to get parts and to get airframes, which in the past has been a problem. It does change kind of what's available out there and how to fight those fires. There's a lot less on the fixed wing side, but definitely something that changes the game and gives a little bit more opportunity for somebody like Bridger.
Given that there's four Spanish scoopers in Europe that you are doing upgrade work on, what specific countries are you potentially targeting for contracts either during this fire season or next fire season? Really, where's the demand at in Europe?
Yeah, you can just flip on the news, although it's hard to get international news sometimes, or read headlines. Greece, you know, Turkey, Portugal, I just was on a phone call about Portugal, and they've had a lot of airframes drop out either through incidents. France, you know, all of the European countries have the problem of CL aircraft being the household name, but a lot of those airframes are dropping out of the service both from staffing issues, parts issues, and you have old piston aircraft that are no longer, you know, supported or flyable. That demand and what we see in grabbing headlines in terms of the fire and the intensity over in Europe, that's only a handful of the countries that we're talking to that, again, they're in the middle of this. It's grabbing headlines.
They have, you know, typical appropriation cycles that they'll have to get behind, but right now there are states of emergency going on that I think that'll dictate, you know, some of the countries I listed looking for these assets.
I think just the last question here. Can you discuss your cash balance here relative to your needs for the existing fleet and what you've looked at in terms of financing options?
Yeah, we just announced the second quarter last week. At the end of the second quarter, we have about $17 million of available cash, which is kind of our low point because we're coming out of our heavy maintenance in the wintertime, and the fire year is really just starting to ramp up. We ended the quarter with about $17 million in cash. We have about $18 million in receivables already. Typically for us, you'll see our cash now build out until probably November, December, but certainly more than sufficient for all of our aircraft, all of the things that we're doing, whether it be on the software side or on the aircraft side to maintain and get those ready with some additional free cash flow that at this point we'll be looking to continue to deleverage our balance sheet.
Typically our cycle is May, June, kind of the low point in our cash, and then it builds up through December as we get through the fire year and collect those receivables.
Great. That brings us to the end of our time today. Thank you so much, Sam and Eric, for coming to talk to us about aerial firefighting and Bridger Aerospace.
Appreciate it. Thank you.