John Franzreb. I'm an analyst here at Sidoti & Company. Our next presentation for the day is Bridger Aerospace, ticker B-A-E-R. For those of you not familiar with the company, Bridger is an aerial firefighting and aerospace services company. We are fortunate to have with us today CEO Sam Davis and CFO Eric Gerratt. Following the presentation, there will be time for Q&A. Please utilize the Q&A icon to submit questions, and I will present them to management. That said, gentlemen, thanks for being with us today. The floor is yours.
Thank you, John. Appreciate it. Pleasure to be with you all. Sam Davis, Chief Executive Officer at Bridger Aerospace. We're an aerial firefighting company headquartered in Bozeman, Montana. We are in the heart of wildfire country, and for the rest of the country, we've noticed that the trends of wildfire are growing in intensity and duration year-over-year and all across the globe. If we can go to our timeline, Bridger was founded fairly recently in 2014 by a former Navy SEAL who had a passion for aviation, and after serving tours overseas, he came back to Montana to combine his passion for aviation with technology, and in the early days, we were putting sensors on aircraft, but quickly turned to very unmet demand in the U.S. for suppression aircraft.
Based on a 2009 RAND report, we noticed that there was a very underserved market for suppression aircraft, specifically water scooping aircraft known as the Super Scooper. At the time, the type certificate was defunct for the Super Scooper. Only four of them were in the U.S. under a Canadian-owned entity. Bridger took it upon itself to relaunch the type certificate and bring six of those Super Scoopers, which were end-of-life, back to a zero-time airframe and into the U.S. and put them on contract. We received the first two of those in 2020 and two every year subsequent through 2022, and had our first full year of operations with six of our Scoopers that we now have in the U.S. That trend has continued in terms of both utilization and the demand of a very highly efficient airframe, as well as international opportunities.
We manage a joint venture of a return to service on four additional Scoopers that were former Spanish military aircraft and are currently closing on the purchase of those two aircraft that are airworthy and managing the return to service on the remainder. So the intent is to grow our fleet to eight and potentially 10 over time. A very high-demand asset for us, very effective in what they do, able to drop water continuously as they scoop and drop on an open body of water and nearly anywhere in the U.S. We also have seen a demand increase as we've gone back into the sensor world and put sensors onto aircraft for air attack or air surveillance.
Just like our Scoopers, which are highly efficient and purpose-built for their mission, the surveillance side of wildfire has taken off by leaps and bounds with an industry that's now using technology for early detection and active command and control over fire. Bridger's led the space there by putting sensors onto aircraft and providing turnkey solutions with the federal and state customers, both as they've adopted technology that's existed in the military for years and put it more into practice with aggressive wildfire management. This has been very important for the country because the trends of wildfire continue to grow, as I mentioned, in intensity and duration and year-round activity. We've seen wildfires, as with the Palisades Fire earlier this year in January, unfortunately consuming 22,000 acres and a lot of high-profile homes, I believe around 7,000 homes, and just devastation that cannot be unwound.
And unfortunately, if not acted quickly upon, there's not much that can be done to stop it. Bridger has been in a unique position to combat this growing threat with our assets. The initial attack of the Super Scoopers, which are best when fires are small and we can act quickly and drop water on them, as well as on our surveillance side where we can detect and provide active real-time surveillance above fire so that we can effectively combat it.
The wildfires that we've seen continue to grow because of both the effects of climate change and what that is causing on an annual basis in terms of acres burned, number of fires, number of large fires, but also the effects of humans moving into wildfire-prone areas called the wildland-urban interface, where not only are the folks moving into these areas causing more wildfires, they're being affected more by it, so there has to be intervention. And then finally, the mega fires that are happening are creating a lot more carbon being released into the atmosphere and exacerbating the effect of wildfires. But Bridger has the right solution with the assets that we have. I talked a little bit about the lengthening of the wildfire year.
Bridger now has changed its philosophy from its early days of being on a call when needed or a standby basis to understanding that fire is every month of the year and having our entire maintenance schedule constructed around how we manage airframes and making sure that we have aircraft, both surveillance and suppression, ready year-round, as well as our training and our pilots and maintainers and ground crews ready to go at a moment's notice, at least within 48-hour turnaround to match what wildfires are doing as they move across the country and being able to deploy anywhere that fires are breaking out. This year alone, we flew from the Carolinas to California and from Texas to Alaska and literally had planes that went out in January and never actually came back to home base until November of this year.
We have seen, unfortunately, with the events that we've seen at a national level and the public awareness that comes, there has to be action taken. So that's the good side of what's coming in the way that wildfires are managed, as well as the actions that are being taken at the federal level. So this year alone, we saw an executive order signed that focuses on the right way to manage wildfire, which is rapid response times, standards of cover, the right mix of aviation assets, and a construct around how wildfires are managed. So as threats move around the country, contracting vehicles exist to make sure that aviation's assets are on standby and ready to act quickly when it matters before fires come out of control. Underpinning all of this is a restructure of the agencies.
There have been up to five agencies that interact or act on wildfire, but there's a centralization as well that is happening behind the scenes to move everything underneath the Department of the Interior, which is the most proactive, progressive agency in managing wildfires early and when it matters. And why all this is important is it's a convergence of all the things the industry needs and truly Americans need for wildfire to be effectively managed in the most aggressive way possible. And why this matters to Bridger is that we have all of the right solutions that are unique to us. With the Scoopers, we have initial attack, direct attack assets, what we believe to be the best tools out there that can drop the largest amount of water in a short amount of time for suppression.
And again, before wildfires get out of control, they're great tools to be an extended attack when fires get large, but most effective in that initial attack phase. And then we also have surveillance planes that are really important as a shift in management goes to early detection and real-time situational awareness to actively and aggressively manage wildfire. So uniquely positioned there for us to take advantage of all the opportunity. We continue to see an increase in demand for wildfire, both in preparedness and wildfire suppression. This is one area that we saw this year while all the budget cuts were happening at the administration. We saw this increased modestly, which is a big step for wildfire management, especially in today's climate.
And we also see, in wildfire and with all the legislation that we showed previously, a very strong, unwavering bipartisan support because it's the one thing that all Americans can get behind when we see wildfire affect all of us. So these are all the right changes and a little bit of a unique opportunity in that it's impervious to what is happening at a political level at times with some of these budget spends or decisions being made on how things are contracted. Next slide. We talked a little bit about how these year-round fires are extending our flight hours.
Bridger's been very effective in both our strategy on how we maintain, operate, and make sure we're ready for year-round deployment, as well as how we're targeting contracts and pricing strategy and negotiations with federal and state contracts to make sure that we're maximizing the number of days we're deployed. Why this is important is because before a year unfolds, if we have a multi-year exclusive use task order in hand, we know we're guaranteed the majority of our revenue, which is built around a daily availability rate, in hand regardless of what unfolds in a year. Even though the trends are up and to the right in terms of the wildfire demand, it's great to have that security and that surety around how many days we're deployed.
The other positive we've realized, and especially this year, is the number of days we're out also dictates or influences how many hours flown. Once our aircraft are in the hands of an incident manager, they use the best tools out there, which are Bridger's tools, to actively fight fire, and so we tend to see more hours correlated to how many days we're out deployed in the field. The pre-positioning of our assets is paramount in being used effectively, and so we saw this year, for example, we were able to move four of our Scoopers to a 120-day task order, and we saw record hours on our entire fleet, including our Scoopers, even though this year was a little bit of a below-average fire year for the last five-year trend. Our geographic footprint continues to expand.
I think this is a map that's very recent of how many states we've been deployed to and active in, and Bridger's unique that we have extreme mobility with our entire fleet. The Scoopers, as I mentioned, can scoop and drop water from an open water source. We don't need tanker bases. We have trucks and trailers and crews that follow our planes around anywhere in the country and can be deployed from one state to the next within a 24-hour notice. We have contracts that exist at the federal and state level, and we make sure that we list our aircraft on as many contracts as possible, call when needed, and exclusive use so that whoever holds the exclusive use contract is who the other agencies have to go through because we don't make decisions about where we're deployed necessarily.
We want to make sure we have as much competitive froth in hand to make sure that wherever we're needed in the country, we're being asked for. The fact that we have on the Scooper side a very unique corner of the market with Scoopers as the largest owner-operator of Scoopers in the world, there's a scarcity problem that really increases the demand of those as we hold on to those and see them create their own popularity. But also on the surveillance side, we have the premier leading-edge technology and configurations at the federal level that are creating a lot of demand at the state level as well as they see what's possible to use technology to manage fire, which didn't even exist in the space up to five years ago. We're a full-spectrum aerial firefighting company.
We offer everything from, like I said, the early detection, the real-time command and control, and the suppression side. Again, I'll touch on why that matters is because as a shift goes from just intercepting fires when things are out of control in the olden days and looking out a window to see through smoke or detect smoke, things are now changing for that rapid response and detecting fires before they even turn into flame. A comparison of what sets us apart from our competitors is quite easily explained in the fact that we have unique tools in the toolbox that are differentiated from other operators out there. The most near comparison would be to our competitor, Aero-Flite, which has four Scoopers in the U.S. owned by a Canadian company. But even in that space, there's 10 Scoopers in the U.S. We have six.
There's enough capacity that we know there's unmet demand or unfulfilled task orders every year that we're convinced we can continue to bring Scoopers into the U.S. and have them earn the same economics as what we already have. As a comparison to other assets out there, tanker planes drop retardant, which is an indirect attack, different tools in the toolbox, and we compare to helicopters or even single-engine Scoopers, which are retrofitted agricultural planes, not necessarily in the same realm as Super Scoopers, and any incident commander would manage a fire with a mix of assets, as you just saw on the screen, of which Super Scoopers are a premier. What sets the Scoopers apart? I've hinted at some of this. We can continuously scoop and drop water on a tank of fuel, which is about four hours.
And in that four-hour time, we can scoop about 1,412 gal every scoop, about 12 seconds. So within the course of a day, and depending on distance from the water source, we can drop hundreds of thousands of gal with a Scooper, and typically they fly in pairs. So there have been many success stories from the field where we've intercepted a fire lower than a few hundred acres and stopped the next Palisades Fire or Smokehouse Creek Fire from happening. Because again, with an initial indirect attack asset like this, it's important to intercept these early before conditions worsen. High temps, high winds can take a small flame and turn it into a million acres and wipe out homes and lives. Bridger has incredible success stories. And again, from the field, a lot of incident command teams are demanding or requesting these assets by name because they see what's possible. Next slide. I'll let Eric, our CFO, touch on some of the aircraft-level economics that we see in the past couple of years.
Yeah, just quickly, this slide just gives you a snapshot of the economics on our Scoopers and shows you with an average purchase price of about $32 million and an average annual EBITDA contribution unburdened of $8 million, that it's a pretty quick payback on these. They're very high-revenue generating and, more importantly, profit-generating assets, and just in the interest of time, I think if we can jump to slide 23, you can see a quick snapshot of the trajectory of our growth. As Sam mentioned, we brought the first two Scoopers on in 2020, the second two in 2021, and the last two at the end of 2022, beginning of 2023.
And so you can see the growth that kind of accompanied the addition of those very significant assets, in addition to the enhancements and the addition of our surveillance program and the adoption and better utilization of all of our assets, translating into significant revenue growth and very significant EBITDA and earnings growth, culminating in this year. We expect to be north of $120 million of revenue and on the higher end of our EBITDA range of $42-$48 million with an expected continued growth trajectory as we go into 2026 and beyond.
The other thing I'll touch on real quickly is we did complete a refinancing of almost all of our debt at the end of October, resulting in a five-year facility that includes a $210 million term loan, a $21.5 million revolving facility, and most importantly, a $100 million deferred draw facility that allows us and provides us capital to continue to add aircraft to our fleet and get them on contract and drive growth starting in 2026 and beyond.
Great. Thanks, Eric. I'll touch on our growth roadmap. Some of this was interweaved in what I talked about earlier, but we're continuing to see the trend of how we utilize our current core fleet year-over-year. We're becoming better and better at managing our deployment to meet the unmet demand out there year-round, both how we manage things operationally, our uptime, and our maintenance activities, and so on.
As well as in our contract and our pricing strategy, we've been wildly successful with focusing on the number of days we have guaranteed work, targeting state and federal contracts alike to make sure that we have competitive tension going and guaranteeing that we're driving our core levels of revenue higher. We're continuing to expand our geography, as we showed in the slide showing all of the states that we cover. We've been managing a return to service on Spanish aircraft, formerly from the Spanish military that I mentioned, and are looking to purchase the first two of those four and put them into operation, most likely in Europe at least for this year or next year, I should say, and then years subsequent potentially bringing them into the U.S.
I also mentioned this, but we continue to add airframes that we believe to be next-gen adjacent to the mission that we do already. We have an exceptional team of pilots, mechanics, and engineers that can integrate turnkey solutions wherever the customer's needs are, wherever the budgets are, and we've been able to do so to date and can do so into the future, really introducing tip-of-the-spear technological solutions to an industry that has been behind even decades from what is possible. We're continuing to integrate that technology. We have a software platform to where even this year we were able to live stream video above a fire, the Dragon Bravo Fire at the Grand Canyon back to Secretary Burgum in Washington, D.C.
And we're now using our software platform to be a true common operating platform of interactive fire data that does not quite exist in the space to the way we're developing it. And then I mentioned this, but we've got our Spanish Scoopers that are coming online and with us in 2025, 2026. Next slide. I think, is that the end of the topic and point for questions? Yeah. So with that, John, I don't know if we want to open it up for any questions.
Sure. If anyone has a question, please utilize the Q&A icon, and I'll present it to management. With that said, could you kind of address the availability of Super Scoopers for you to purchase and maybe walk us through? It sounds like you're retrofitting them all. If that's the case, why did they discontinue the production of new ones?
Great question. The challenge there is a unique opportunity for Bridger. So there are only roughly around 250 Super Scoopers ever manufactured in the world today. We believe there's 150-160 that are still operational. And of that subset, I want to say less than 120 are turbine versions like what we have that are operational. We, Bridger, went to it was Viking at the time, it's now De Havilland to restart the type certificate, which was defunct and had been sitting for a while, to bring six of these Super Scoopers, which were shown on the screen but sitting in Calgary and were not operational and had reached the end of their life to zero-time them. And that was our purchase agreement from the years 2020 to 2022 where we received those six. Because of the scarcity of these actually in even existence, the opportunity like the Spanish Super Scoopers never comes up.
When it does, we're there, obviously. We got the lead on the four that are in Spain and are doing the same exact approach because of how high value these assets are and how high demand and scarce they are. De Havilland is producing a 515 version. They, I think, are advertising a delivery timeline of 2029, but the challenge, and hence the opportunity for Bridger, is that they have roughly 20-plus orders on that production line that are all country and province specific. They have historically never talked to private owner-operators, which may be changing with Bridger's being the largest owner-operator, so there may be discussions going on there, but even then, the delivery timeline for those to actually reach a meaningful capacity is, my opinion, it won't be till 2030s, 2040s.
So again, creating a good competitive advantage for us as we maximize the utilization that we have and then continue to, pardon the pun, scoop up the opportunities of these additional planes as they come onto the market, and looking for the next-gen as well, which is on the radar. Does that suggest that you may be open to other aerial platforms to expand your business profile? I mean, such as helicopters or whatever you suspect. Yeah, exactly. I'll touch on other platforms. We do have a memorandum of understanding with another platform, and this is public information, but it's called ATR 72-600, which is a passenger plane that we're exploring with a French company, Positive Aviation, which is on the ATR or Airbus campus to retrofit those aircraft, which are in production. There's about 1,000, I think, operating worldwide.
So we solved our problem there with a small batch aircraft that's no longer in production to put tanks into those aircraft and to put them on floats to make them Scoopers that have even better capacity than the aircraft we have now. So that's more of a 2029, 2030 delivery timeline for us, but we are always looking for a specific water- scooping aircraft because of the wild success here in the U.S. and the fact that this has never really existed in terms of a tool. You go to Europe and you look at Canada, this is the primary solution for firefighting is the Super Scooper. So we're leading the charge there and we'll stay on top of the solution. But adjacent to it, other tools in the toolbox.
And where we brought up our competitor slide, there's no real truly direct comparison because there's other tools in the toolbox, which also creates opportunity for us, like rotor wings, type one rotor wings specifically, very specific mission. We fly alongside and in the same airspace as them because any incident commander typically wants tankers with retardant, wants water scooping aircraft, wants helicopters, wants ground crews, and wants persistent technologically enhanced surveillance up overhead. So as Bridger builds out the vertical integration of what we do, I truly think about what we call the fire stack over a fire and all those solutions we can add onto our platforms. We're selective about what we would go after because we pick what's the unique solution out there and what leads the industry. We also know where legislation and how fires are being managed so that we're going to pick the thing that best fits where wildfires are going. We've been very successful at that.
I'm going to get to some of the audience questions here. I guess question about, let's call it the servicing of the planes. Is it hard to get parts? It sounds like the duration of time that you have to service is compacting because you're having them out longer. Is that proven to be any kind of an issue or problem?
It's more of a logistical challenge, right? We actually now, I would say in our early years, the parts game, for lack of a better word, of having a very unique airframe and a limited amount in the field and then a supply chain that truly is restarting. So one of the benefits of De Havilland restarting this 515 program, it's about 95% compatible with the airframes we have today. So there's benefits, synergy of them restarting the whole production line. So that's gotten better. Bridger has gotten way better at building the experience we need in field of what parts fail, how to have them on hand and in supply in our what we call our MRUs or maintenance repair units, which follow the Scoopers around. They're extensions of our repair station. And we have those trucks and trailers stocked with enough inventory that we didn't have one Scooper come home to home base and sit out in the field all year.
So we've gotten really good at managing minimum levels of inventory, what parts fail, and what we need on hand. It's a very, very critical part of the business are o ur stores and logistics team has been doubled over the last year to make sure that we're staying out uptime with the customer, both from a customer satisfaction standpoint and the revenue we get. Again, a challenge, but I will say not a lot of folks can stay in this space and do it as effective and efficient as we have, especially once we've built that cadence and that reputation.
Question from the audience regarding the recent debt refinancing purchase agreement. They want to maybe provide some more color on the terms of the new senior credit facility. When is it due and what's the interest rate?
Yep. So if you can see the slide that we have right now, it gives you in that second bullet kind of the breakdown of the $331 million. The large piece is the $210 million term loan that we took on at the end of October. It's a five-year term. In terms of the interest rate, it's SOFR plus 6% is the interest rate on the facility. And the deferred draw facility is $100 million is good for two years. And we go through a process to make draws on that. But as Sam mentioned, as we find aircraft to acquire that we can put on contract and which are immediately accretive, it's a pretty streamlined process with our lending partners. So it's a pretty great facility.
I want to sneak another question in. Is the pricing environment for the contracts different based on geographies, be it Canada versus the United States, be it one state in maybe the East Coast, the Central U.S. versus the West Coast? Is there variances there or not?
There are a nd I will say that's more of an effect of the budget available, the appropriations available, whether it's Canada or on a state basis. Obviously, the federal budget, there's more. We use as a part of our strategy, I will say, for the state of Montana, for example, we have contracts that are exclusive use that we can price competitively and make sure that we have planes accounted for so that the federal government has to call up and realize that there's scarcity if they don't lock up those assets. But they're near home for us, so it's a lot cheaper for us to operate. So we factor in our pricing based on what's out there from an appropriation standpoint, but knowing what margins we need to get depending if we're operating in North Carolina versus our home state of Montana.
I will say that the choosiness with which we can go approach customers and hold to rate structures that are beneficial for us as well as escalators built in has gotten wildly more improved, especially as we see all the opportunity growing in a way that's outpacing our ability even to meet it.
All right. We are out of time. Sam, Eric, thank you for a very informative presentation. I truly appreciate it. Any closing remarks?
No, appreciate the time and very excited about the future of Bridger and everybody spending time to listen to our pitch.
All right. Thank you, everyone. Have a great night.
Thank you.