It’s already shaping up to be a risky summer for wildfires in southern Utah. The area is parched after a historically dry winter.
In preparation, the state hopes its expanded push to control wildfires with aircraft will help protect communities and firefighters.
“It's a huge, huge investment. It was a great, big payoff,” said Kayli Guild, fire prevention coordinator with the Utah Division of Forestry, Fire and State Lands. “And I believe that we're going to continue to invest that way.”
Aircraft have been an invaluable tool in the state’s firefighting arsenal. A helicopter or air tanker can reach a remote mountainside faster and more safely than a crew of firefighters on foot.
Now, the state wants to make sure people flying amateur drones don’t get in the way of those aerial operations.
If a drone is reported near a wildland fire area, aircraft that would otherwise be working to control the blaze have to be grounded. The process can keep them on the runway for hours, said Bureau of Land Management Fire Management Officer Brandon Davis.
“If you fly, we can't,” he said. “Anytime we have to ground resources because of unauthorized drones in a wildfire area, it delays the containment of that fire longer, which poses more risk and essentially could cost more money to put that fire out.”
Those hours could be precious if a fire is moving quickly, he said, and the delay could put communities at risk. A drone can threaten teams flying in the aircraft, too.
“I can tell you when you're up in that plane, you can't see those things,” Davis said. “There have been incidents where drones have collided with aircraft, and it's scary.”
During the Palisades fire near Los Angeles in early 2025, a man crashed a drone into a firefighting air tanker and later pleaded guilty. The Utah Legislature passed a law in 2016 increasing fines for flying drones in wildfire areas. It’s a federal crime, too.
Still, Davis said his team, which is based in the Arizona Strip just south of St. George, has seen an increase in reports of unauthorized drones in wildfire areas.
“It seems every year there's more and more occurrences of that happening.”
When drone pilots post photos of wildfires to social media, those images can be harmful to firefighting efforts as well. The pictures may not capture the reality of what’s going on, Davis said, and can lead to panic or misinformation about how crews are managing the blaze.
Utah doesn’t have the ability to disable a drone and drop it out of the sky, Guild said. That’s currently against federal regulations. The state could, however, find the pilot and make them shut it down. It’s looking into tracking technology that can provide a drone’s unique identification number.
“If you can get that number, it will give you the location of the person that's running the drone,” Guild said. “So, you can find him, and then you essentially can say, ‘You need to make your drone come home.’”
Clearing the skies is vital, especially as Utah looks to make aircraft a bigger part of its wildfire response. The state has some helicopters and other aircraft in its fleet already, and can call for reinforcements from other states through a federal interagency dispatch center.
That system of sharing is helpful, Guild said, but Utah doesn’t want to put all of its eggs in one basket.
“We are going to continue to grow and expand,” she said. “Instead of always having to deal [with] fighting for resources nationally, we have our own ships, and they stay right here in Utah all year long.”
In the past few years, she’s seen a lot of federal contracts for helicopters and air tankers go away. That means Utah can’t count on those assets being available if they’re needed. Now, with the recent shake-ups in the federal workforce, Guild said, “it's anybody's guess whether they're going to be there next year.” So, it’s a valuable thing for Utah to build up its own resources.
A potential roadmap is included in a report commissioned by Gov. Spencer Cox and released in early June. It recommends adding a support aircraft that’s already in use in California and Colorado, which could help Utah’s flying firefighters better view the situation on the ground with real-time infrared imagery and high-definition mapping.
Guild said it’ll be up to the Legislature to decide if they want to fund those purchases.
