San Bernardino County Fire Protection District has signed a contract to deploy five AI-powered autonomous firefighting aircraft, making it the first fire department in California to train with and fly this kind of system. The agreement with California-based Seneca calls for a strike team capable of reaching a new fire start in five to ten minutes or less, delivering more than 500 gallons of finished foam along the way. Training is set to begin ahead of aircraft delivery in the first and second quarters of 2027, timed to arrive before the county's peak fire season.
What the Strike Team Can Actually Do
According to a statement reported by AVweb, the district has contracted with Seneca to acquire the five autonomous aircraft as part of a broader push into unmanned firefighting technology. The package includes a towable Mobile Air Operations Base and full access to Seneca's autonomy software, according to a PR Newswire announcement. Onboard AI lets the aircraft navigate and coordinate with one another, meaning a single San Bernardino County Fire pilot can operate multiple aircraft at once, even over difficult terrain.
The same announcement notes the aircraft can also operate in darkness using onboard sensors, a capability that matters when some crewed aerial resources are grounded at night. Many wildland fires start in spots ground crews can't reach quickly, per the district, and the strike team is designed to launch from virtually anywhere to close that gap. Beyond initial attack, the aircraft are intended to establish suppressant or retardant perimeters around structures and vegetation ahead of an advancing fire front, and to knock down remaining hot spots during mop-up — work the announcement says can reduce firefighters' exposure to toxic materials while freeing crews for other incidents.
A County the Size of a State's Worth of Risk
San Bernardino County Fire protects more than 2 million residents across a 20,000-square-mile service area, per the same PR Newswire release, with an authorized staffing level of more than 1,100 full-time positions. The agency covers everything from structure fires and medical calls in urban neighborhoods to wildland blazes scattered across canyons, high desert and mountains — terrain that comes with the territory in the nation's largest county by area in the contiguous United States. Fire Chief Dan Munsey, in a quote carried in the announcement, said the department's goal is to stop 90% of fires before they grow larger than 10 square feet, calling Seneca's aircraft a way to deliver autonomous rapid initial attack that wasn't previously possible.
The district already operates a dedicated robotics and unmanned aircraft division, and the station's report notes this new system adds autonomous suppression capability alongside that existing fleet rather than replacing it. The agency worked with Seneca for more than a year to develop a system matching its needs, and it demonstrated Seneca's Argo-1 drone back in December 2025, using thermal imaging and automated targeting to locate and suppress fires, per the same account from AVweb. Seneca describes itself as a resilience technology and infrastructure company, and its systems use infrared and video with autonomous targeting to identify and knock down fires and hot spots, according to Seneca.
Seneca's Bigger Push — and a Timeline Discrepancy
Seneca founder and CEO Stuart Landesberg, quoted in the PR Newswire announcement, said the company seeks partners with excellence, a service mentality and a history of innovation, and described San Bernardino County Fire as a respected all-hazard agency embodying those qualities. The company has raised $60 million to advance its fire-suppression technology, according to The Robot Report, which also reported that Seneca had planned to roll out its first systems during the 2026 fire season. That timeline differs from AVweb's report that aircraft deliveries are planned for the first and second quarters of 2027, with operations expected before peak wildfire season.
San Bernardino County isn't the only agency betting on this technology. The Aspen Fire Protection District committed to a $5 million contract for five Seneca drones over five years, with plans to add the aircraft and a mobile operations base in 2026, according to KDVR, which reported that all five of Aspen's aircraft can likewise be operated at once by a single pilot. Elsewhere, Ars Technica reported that Dryad Networks' Silvaguard system autonomously detected and suppressed a wildfire during testing near Fairbanks, Alaska, in June 2026, using drones that can deploy up to 26 gallons of suppressant from solar-powered hangar pods. Sikorsky and CAL FIRE are separately developing autonomous capabilities for the S-70i Firehawk helicopter, per AVweb's reporting.
San Bernardino County Fire has also been testing smaller water-dropping drones through its Fire Sparrow Mark 10 project with Ponderosa, which currently carries 10 gallons of water, according to CBS News Los Angeles. Ponderosa's long-term vision involves pre-positioning suppression systems in high-risk areas, the outlet reported. On the regulatory side, the FAA has directed continued collaboration with the National Interagency Fire Center to improve emergency airspace-access response times and standardize coordination for drone operations in active fire zones, and federal records show an amended Certificate of Waiver issued to San Bernardino County Fire Protection District for operations under federal aviation rules.
As originally reported by Fire & Safety Journal Americas, the district plans to use the new strike team to support firefighters, engines and existing aerial resources, and to take on operations previously considered unsafe, inefficient or impossible. Whether the technology performs as advertised once it reaches the field next year remains to be seen, but for a county covering 20,000 square miles of desert, mountains and canyons, the appeal of aircraft that can launch fast and fly through the dark is easy to understand.
