A year ago, Sen. Tim Sheehy (R-Montana) was pushing a big change in the way the federal government fights wildfires, including a proposal to get rid of Forest Service inspections of the private planes and helicopters used to fight fires.
Sheehy knows that business well. Before he was elected to the Senate, he founded Bridger Aerospace, a Montana-based aerial firefighting company that has received more than $235 million in Forest Service contracts since 2021.
Now, new reporting from ProPublica has found that at about the same time Sheehy was trying to eliminate those inspections, a Forest Service inspector found a crack in the wing of a Bridger aircraft that had been presented as ready to fly.
Abe Street is one of the reporters who investigated the story, and he joined Idaho Matters to talk more.
