Smoke plumes from the Wallow fire fill the sky in Luna, New Mexico, on Monday. Photo courtesy of AP.

With wildfire season starting early and fires already raging across Arizona, the U.S. Forest Service is confronting a longtime problem that many inside and outside the agency think needs an immediate fix: The large tanker planes leased by the agency to fight such blazes have been flying, on average, about 50 years and are rapidly becoming unsafe to deploy.

The Wallow Fire, named after its starting point at the Bear Wallow Wilderness in eastern Arizona, is said to be burning so fast that it is already the third-largest fire on record and, aided by winds, is on track to becoming the largest ever.

With 389,000 acres charred and 11 buildings completely gutted by the fire already, local authorities ordered the evacuation of over 7,000 residents in two towns directly in the path of the advancing flames.

As worries deepen, the Forest Service is preparing — finally, critics say — to ask Congress this summer for money to replace its fleet of 18 large air tankers. The agency will either ask to buy new planes outright or, more likely, put out bids to lease newer ones.

Owners and operators of private aviation companies that lease air tankers under contract or on a call-when-needed basis have been pressing for this kind of action since two air tanker crashes in 2002.

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