Drones equipped to spray water and fire retardants have been testing their ability to extinguish wildfires early in California and Alaska this summer. These unmanned systems are being explored as a potential rapid-response tool for firefighting amid the growing risk of wildfires that now threaten much of the United States nearly year-round. Most drones are smaller than crewed aircraft and have shorter flight ranges, limiting their ability to replace large airtankers in delivering large payloads of water or fire-suppressing agents to remote fires. However, companies and fire agencies are testing whether drones can help crews respond more quickly to small fires before they escalate. The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, known as CAL FIRE, ran its own field test involving five autonomous drones that worked together to deploy between 500 and 1,000 gallons of foam combined for suppressing fires on July 15, according to the TV station KPMH. The demonstration was organized with the help of the nonprofit FireWERX and the California-based company Seneca, which is making the drones commercially available starting in 2026. Each of Seneca’s Argo-1 drones can carry about 100 pounds of water or fire retardant while working together in swarms of four to six drones. Once a human operator uploads a GPS waypoint, the autonomous drones fly toward their target and use onboard sensors to spot the heat signature of a fire, HeliOps Magazine reported. The drones then find the best hovering altitude before each lining up to spray the fire, one after the other. The fully loaded drones are limited to a round trip of 10 miles while flying at about 30 miles per hour on average, which means they would ideally need to be prepositioned in fire-prone areas or first transported by ground vehicle. But each drone can fit in the back of a pickup truck with the tailgate down, and two people can even manually carry the empty drones. Seneca told HeliOps Magazine that the goal is to enable firefighters to refill a returning drone’s payload and swap in a fresh battery so that it’s ready to fly again in two minutes. The company previously demonstrated its drone technology for San Bernardino County Fire in December 2025. Testing in the Alaskan wilderness

Source: arstechnica