Good morning, and welcome to the Noble Capital Markets Virtual Equity Conference. I am Joe Gomes, Managing Director and Senior Analyst at Noble Capital Markets. Today, I have the pleasure of introducing Bridger Aerospace Group Holdings, Inc. Following the presentation, we will have some time for Q&A. With us today from the company is Sam Davis, President and CEO. The floor is yours, Sam.
Awesome. Thank you, Joe. Pleasure to be with you all, and really excited to talk to you today about Bridger Aerospace. I will flip through slides here and give you an overview of the company, some background, and then we'll open it up for Q&A. Bridger Aerospace is an aerial firefighting company. Our mission is to protect lives, property, and the environment. It influences everything we do from our early days, and our mission has grown stronger than ever through the years. We've been a pretty rapidly growing company and really taken the industry by storm. We're one of the premier national aerial firefighting companies, and even in the globe as we expand. What we offer in services is quite simply, we deliver water and intelligence and modifications and services to other aviation providers. We deliver water via our Super Scoopers, which are the most efficient purpose-built aircraft.
We have the largest privately owned fleet in the world. We can scoop and drop water and deliver a large amount when seconds matter, when lives and homes are threatened. We provide real-time aerial surveillance intelligence from overhead, an eye in the sky, both with command and control missions with government officials on radios, helping ground crews and air assets provide suppression and containment efforts, as well as real-time intelligence with sensor technology that we live stream down to the ground. Also we offer integration solutions for our defense sector customers, a lot of which we bring into fire and then vice versa, which is a pretty solid part of the business and growing. Just as way of reference for our revenue last year, about 65% of it was suppression. Mods and integration were around 17%, and surveillance was 15% of that.
We operate all over the U.S., fighting fire. We're based in Belgrade, Montana, which is near Big Sky Country at the Bozeman Airport, and we have a location in Huntsville, Alabama. Our customers, which I'll talk about a little bit more, are primarily federal and state agencies, as well as other branches of the military. We have about 100% renewal rate on our fire contracts, and we have 100% collectability, so the resilience of our revenue is there and growing and improving over time. Our investment thesis, what's kind of set us apart, what makes us different is obviously our Super Scooper fleet, which is the largest private fleet of Super Scoopers. We have eight in total. Six of those are based in the U.S., and there are only 10 in total in the U.S., so we have six of them.
There was a RAND Corporation report in 2009 which largely influenced our business to get into the Scooper world, and that said that at the time, 43 Scoopers at least were needed to serve the U.S. to scoop and drop water. Bridger Aerospace saw our entry point, and convinced the OEM at the time to restart the Type Certificate and receive six of them into the U.S. We ended last year with getting two of them from the Spanish military and plan to bring those into the U.S. as well. We have 20 total aircraft. It continues to grow as we see unmet demand across the country for suppression and surveillance, both driven by Mother Nature as well as the agencies and the government funding stepping up to commit our aircraft to provide protection year-round. We continue to see national headline-grabbing fires, unfortunately, like the Palisades fire in California in January.
Texas was the year before in February with the Smokehouse Creek fire, which are driving change with unfortunate events to fortunately benefit Americans with how fire is managed, and Bridger Aerospace is at the tip of that. By way of reference, we see unmet demand near 50% for our Scoopers and some of our surveillance planes, meaning there's just not enough aircraft to go around. That's largely driving how we look at organic growth and buying planes and continuing to grow. This is against a backdrop of the aerial firefighting market as well, seeing continuous growth in demand year-over-year. Underpinning that is the high performance that these aircraft can do and the profit that they bring on a standalone basis, with nearly 40% pass-through to the bottom line. Really quickly, just a visual representation of both our aircraft and what we do in the field.
You can see the mix of our aircraft and what they do specifically. They each perform different missions, and we've used them as both a feeder program to grow internally as well as to capture market share for what we call the fire stack, which is on the right-hand side of the screen. What we do is operating in theater from low altitudes. The Scoopers drop about 100 ft- 150 ft above the ground, they'll drop water, just above tree lines to be effective on dropping water. Then up above them, we have surveillance planes which are doing command and control, both with ground crews and coordinating suppression efforts below them.
Even above that stack, we have our sensor-enhanced aircraft, which this year we introduced our King Air with multiple sensors to do both command and control with thermal detection, real-time video, downlink with Starlink, and as well perimeter mapping so that we can predict what fires are doing and then understand what makes ground crews and suppression aircraft effective in managing the fire. The Scoopers, which are the flagship of the company, are pretty incredible machines. There is a very scarce supply of them worldwide. The production line is now restarting with orders to be delivered through the 2030s. But those orders are all accounted for by provinces and countries. Bridger Aerospace and our one competitor, we own the entire private fleet of the modern versions. Bridger Aerospace grew that, like I mentioned, from six to eight last year.
We continue to look for ways to grow that while the new platform is still yet to come online and serve the demand we see in the U.S. and even around the world. The purchase price or the average market value of these Super Scoopers is $35 million. That is for return to service and near zero-time machines. The new DHC-515, which is next gen, is around a sticker price of $60 million. We really have a unique airplane that is very effective in creating revenue in a short payback period and very effective and wildly popular at what it does.
As you can see on the screen, it scoops on an open body of water, about 12 seconds, a 1,400-gallon tank of water, and can continuously drop water on fire until it needs to land and refill for fuel, which is unique because, in a day, a couple of these Super Scoopers can drop hundreds of thousands of gallons of water and only need to land and refuel once. Sets us apart from a lot of our tanker competitors, where they need to land at a tanker base, refill with a hose with retardant, and then return to the fire, oftentimes costing an hour in total turnaround time. So very effective and a lot of incident commanders, now that they have Super Scoopers in the U.S., request us by name specifically to control fires. A little bit of our strategy and how we have grown the company is shown on this slide.
Again, around the Super Scoopers, a lot of this pertains to the Air Attack assets as well. As we have grown our Super Scooper fleet methodically over time, you can see that we have started in our early days with federal contracts with the U.S. Forest Service under a pure call-when-needed standpoint. That means when we were called, we went and were deployed for fire and created a lot of uncertainty and us predicting what kind of fire activity we thought we would have, as well as how we should price our Super Scoopers. We are paid by day and by hour, so a daily availability rate and a flight hour rate, both determined by the customer, what those days and hours are.
We chipped away at that very methodically, and you can see from 2023 through 2026, we were able to guarantee days of work for our Super Scooper fleet, this year arriving at four on 160-day task order this year in the U.S., and the two that we acquired in Spain were on a 90-day task order in Portugal. Why this is significant, obviously, is we know what our floor is to be paid for availability in revenue, which is very significant for us. You can also see that this has just methodically driven up our utilization and therefore our margins to expand both for the Super Scoopers. That means that we are seeing more hours, which is the variable component of our pay, just for the more days that we are out. Why that matters is that our Super Scoopers are purpose-built to be initial and direct attack.
They need to be prepositioned, and they're most effective when fires are started in the 48 hours. That's how fires should be managed, is being managed more, and we see more days of work regardless of megafires grabbing headlines or continued increase in fire activity year round. Another couple of things to touch on there. We do see some pretty strong protection. Fuel for the Scoopers on contract is all passed through to the government. We're asked quite often how much we're affected by fuel prices. Actually, not that much. The Scooper fleet is all pass-through, like I said, but the Air Attack side of the business, we factor in some inflation year-over-year for our fuel, and get discounts on some volume fuel contracts. One of the things we're most excited about with our fleet and growing is the capacity in the market for sensor-enhanced aircraft.
These are not only extremely disruptive to the industry, they are bringing military-grade technology and situational awareness to ground firefighters. This is near and dear to our mission. We see this expanding greatly over the next few years, and it's very incredible margins. Not only are we bringing unique proprietary configurations and sensors into the space, we're able to do every mission possible. We've even mapped floods with these, managed prescribed burns, detected thermal spots, real-time video for ground crews, perimeter mapping, and even doing fire modeling. This is also being coupled with our software, which is proprietary to us, and being delivered as part of our aviation contracts. Why this matters is intelligence needs to be real time, but it needs to be delivered in one place for people, as you can imagine, in an emergency situation to make real-time decisions to save lives and property.
This is both on desktop and mobile apps, so we even have ground firefighters to see video imagery from overhead from Bridger aircraft by simply scanning a QR code and joining an incident. Basically overnight this year when we launched this, we had about 30,000 users, most of them firefighters. Really excited about this part of the business and how we can fill out our mission, make our aviation contracts stickier, as well as tap into a market of the software need that's out there that does not have data in one ecosystem. To touch on our Bridger growth map, which you've seen in the slides previously, we continue to expand our fleet. We continue to evolve our contracts, both the guaranteed work there, as well as how we price and lean on more flight hours to get more pass-through profit.
We continue to lead in technology by introducing military-grade solutions into wildfire. We're doing that at the federal level, and the first to market in all fronts, and coupling that with our software. Looking for those opportunities to diversify. I even consider diversification expanding our sensor fleet, because those are used for multi missions, more year-round than just the suppression efforts, and obviously coupled with software and so on, as we look at fire as an essential service and a year-round mission. A quick highlight of our financials, just to show our growth. Again, this is against a backdrop of a moderate but not a crazy amount of addition of aircraft, showing our improvement as a company on producing more with what we have, as well as the aircraft we're choosing, which are contributing much more revenue and higher margins.
Last year, finishing at $45 million adjusted EBITDA, and this year on track for $55 million- $60 million. This is helping us grow into our capital stack, which has been, on the early days, one that we had to take on to build the fleet and the infrastructure, and now we're able to deliver free cash flow and really unlock some value there. This is a highlight of the full-year outlook, which I think I touched on most of this. Very exciting time for Bridger as we look to 2026 and beyond. I think I'll skip to this slide in the interest of time. We have continued trends that are increasing what demand we have for everything that Bridger chooses to do.
We have legislation behind all of this that is really driving primarily standards of cover, an increase in number of aircraft needed across the entire country, year-round work, and the adoption of technology, which we all see on the horizon. We're already benefiting from a lot of this, even in draft status. We see this as the guiding North Star for us as we continue to invest and expand the business. I know that was a lot, trying to keep it short, but maybe I would like to turn it over for any questions, if there are any.
Thanks, Sam. Great insightful presentation. Let's turn to some questions now. You just walked through a number of growth opportunities in the presentation. When you step back, what has changed most about Bridger over the last 12 months- 18 months, and why is the company better positioned today?
Yeah. Great question, Joe. I think it's really been on the fruition of our vision of what we saw the wildfire industry needing, primarily around Scoopers. So we took a lot of risk to capital on early to get that fleet into the U.S. There was a lot of infrastructure and so on that we had to do both, you can imagine, capital expenditures, pilots, maintainers, trucks, trailers, to be able to operate all over the U.S. But we saw that finally come into play once we locked in those guaranteed task orders with the Forest Service, once everybody saw how effective and high demand our Scoopers were. I tell everybody they're the best marketing tool out there. They're incredible to watch, but they're very effective at what they do.
That has unlocked value for the company to get us the profit we need to go invest in the other part that I see, which is technology. The technology or sensor-enhanced planes that we have about the same percentage-wise pass-through on their margins as the Super Scoopers. They have more of a year-round calendar of how they operate, and they are continuing to open up opportunities for what other data we bring in and software. That is in Bridger's performance. I would say that would be the first kind of benefit we have had. Also, we see in the industry major changes to how wildfire is managed. I showed that legislation slide, but it really is showing that wildfire is being managed aggressively for early detection, suppression, and some of these missions that is driving up our utilization and the demand for aircraft that we had.
Those two things converging with what Mother Nature continues to do is the right time for the industry to have Bridger as a solution.
Okay. Thank you for that. One of the more compelling data points in the presentation is that nearly half of Super Scooper requests went unmet last year.
Yes. Right.
Why is there such an imbalance in these requests, and how can you capture more of this demand?
Yeah. Quite simply, the imbalance is because there are 10 here in the U.S. We have six of them. When we see a fire year like this year where I believe our scoopers moved bases over 90 x, it was days between moves. We had fires in Spokane and Utah and Arizona and California going on at the same time. Requests are coming in for water scooping aircraft with our capacity. We're on a standalone contract. They were unfilled because the planes were somewhere else, right? That somewhere else, the federal government determined was a more high threat area. How that influences how Bridger looks at it is, how do we get more Scoopers? The Spanish planes that we bought last year was kind of down to the end of the year.
We weren't able to get them into the U.S. in time to equip them and certify them. That'll be the plan this year. We flew kind of a partial year under a dry lease in Portugal, but that's one thing we're doing is how can we get more of these scoopers as they get decommissioned, and bring them into service in the U.S. to fill those UTF they're called unable to fill requests.
Okay. You did talk about a shift towards longer duration contracts. What are you seeing from customers today? How could that evolution change the predictability and economics of the company's business over time?
Yeah, I would say, and this is a little bit more directional from what I hear and see, but they talked about an agency consolidation or moving. There was five different agencies that managed wildfire. They've tried to coordinate efforts and it's been a little touch and go this year, but the unification is still on the radar to happen. I believe that whatever that shape that takes, it will mean that aviation contracts roll under one agency, the U.S. Wildland Fire Service. Why that's significant for us is the U.S. Wildland Fire Service is very much of a mindset that we need to have aerial firefighting, like a local fire department, a fire department in the sky, if you will, and cover the country year-round because now we see fires literally January through December, and have aircraft available, pre-positioned, and ready to go within that rapid response time when it matters.
For that to happen, operators like Bridger, we need to have contracts in place because as you can imagine, we need to do maintenance, training, all those things, so I cannot at risk take aircraft down that might be called up, and I cannot at risk leave them all ready to go if I have maintenance to do. So that if anything has driven more of that expansion on the guaranteed work for the contracts, I believe that that's just going to continue to grow, which is incredible for us because it's what we need to run a true essential service company.
Great. Can you expand a little bit more on the $58 million Texas A&M Forest Service award? What is this opportunity longer term? Do you expect other states to follow this type of a model?
Yeah. Texas, we spent a lot of time with Texas trying to help them with a problem. Their problem was what I just described to you. They would call up for federal assets and a lot of times, when they'd have fires, federal contracts didn't have anything available, or they were elsewhere in the country. So they decided, in Texas fashion, to start their own air force for firefighting and put out an RFP for aviation platforms. And really they had seen what Bridger had done at the federal level with our King Airs and our multi-sensor payload and how we were live streaming into our app. Nobody else was doing it. And essentially said, "We want that for our own state, and we want Bridger to be a part of that once we've won that RFP." So great opportunity for us to bring brand-new aircraft.
We are partnering with Textron, our specific configurations, and even our software into their hands. We also are going to pursue follow-on work to be the service provider, and I think we have a decent chance of getting that for the long term. We are excited because we are bringing our solution, obviously making money off of it, but having a longer-term contract that is more of a special mission-type rollout for Bridger. To answer your last part of your question, I do think a lot of states are going to look for something like this. Now, whether or not they try to get a Scooper or two Scoopers on a state contract with their budgets, the sensor world has unlimited ability for them to add a patrol aircraft, basically, that can serve really all hazards.
I mean, everything from emergency response, flood, disasters, hurricane relief, that sort of search and rescue, these aircraft can do it all.
Okay. Thank you for that insight. How should investors think about the international opportunity and the ability to deploy aircraft across different geographies and fire seasons?
Yeah. I think that is expanding greatly, with the global threat of wildfires. Europe had another record year, I think. I saw headlines where 65,000 people were evacuated from Bordeaux. It was unfortunate to see. I think, with that as a catalyst, pun intended, the change in the shift to private contracting is real, and that creates opportunity for us. Never been a thing outside the U.S. The easiest thing to ship is our tech platforms, both logistically and contractually. So we see a lot of opportunity there, not only in covering the globe, but also in the calendar year. So we are making some strides in talking to a lot of countries on how we can get that solution together. The Scoopers are unique because the economics and the demand here are so high, we are actually moving them from Europe back to the U.S.
But would love to start thinking about a global fleet we could move around to operate wherever fires are in the world.
Let's finish up with this one, Sam. You got a lot of opportunities. You got the Scoopers, surveillance aircraft, technology, international expansion. As you sit in that chair, how do you think about allocating capital and deciding where the next dollar of investment will generate the highest return?
Yeah, great question. With the economics you can see on the aircraft, we're adding to on contract growth. Right now, that's the nearest to us and the largest capacity of common sense application of our capital. Whether it's to go buy more Scoopers, to invest in the next solution for water scooping aircraft, or putting technology on aircraft, the high margins, the payback period are immediately accretive. We see the demand growing year-over-year pretty rapidly. It's not just about market share capture, it's about what they can bring to the bottom line almost immediately. That's near and dear. Obviously, the M&A opportunities in this industry being largely fragmented and mom and pop is there as well.
That's maybe a little bit too early to talk about right now, but definitely on the radar for what additionally is out there that would help us be a more integrated service provider.
Great. Well, Sam, we've come to the end of our allotted time. We've covered a lot of ground today and got significant insight into what Bridger does, its markets, and opportunities. We appreciate you taking the time to participate in our conference, and we wish you and the company the best in the future. Thanks again, Sam.
Thank you, Joe. I appreciate your time.