PHOTOS: The Wenatchee Valley Fire Department has received a second helicopter to fight fires after a lengthy refurbishing of a helicopter that was mothballed at the Malaga Heliport and hangar. The 1962 Bell UH-1H is commonly called a Huey, and it was flown in from Olympia and arrived Sunday afternoon. The new helicopter doubles the capability for the department and increases the availability of air resources in the area.
Chelan County Fire Commissioner Phil Dormaier was on the delivery flight back to Wenatchee and remarked on the decade-long effort, culminating with the addition of a second Huey to the WVFD fleet. “This is a great day for us. We started looking at this back in 2015 after the Sleepy Hollow Fire and the problems we had in getting air assets at that time. We knew we had this second ship here in the hangar, and it had been sitting here for a few decades, so we thought, why are we sitting on this? We should get this operational and get it in the air and serving everyone here in the valley.”
Fire Chief Brian Brett says the aircraft is a refurbished Huey that was sitting in the Malaga hangar and was used for parts to service the WVFD’s other Huey. In 2021, the department decided to refurbish the hull, engine, transmission, rotor blades, and other useful parts and sell others that were not necessary. The nearly $90,000 in proceeds was used for the rebuild, and additional parts were acquired through a federal government surplus program at no cost to the fire department.
