Bridger Aerospace at Canaccord Conference: Strategic Insights on Wildfire Management

On Tuesday, 12 August 2025, Bridger Aerospace Group Holdings Inc (NASDAQ:BAER) took the stage at Canaccord Genuity’s 45th Annual Growth Conference, offering a detailed view into its strategic positioning and challenges in the aerial firefighting market. The company highlighted its strengths in fleet capabilities and technological advancements while addressing financial maneuvers to reduce leverage.

Key Takeaways

• Bridger Aerospace operates 6 of the 10 Super Scoopers in the U.S., emphasizing early response to wildfires.
• The company is responding to increased demand for firefighting services due to climate change and forest mismanagement.
• A sale-leaseback of hangar space reduced leverage by approximately 25%.
• Bridger is exploring European markets, managing the return of Spanish scoopers to service.
• Technological advancements include the Ignis app for real-time situational awareness.

Financial Results

• Bridger Aerospace completed a sale-leaseback of its hangar space at Bozeman Airport for $46 million, reducing leverage by about 25%.
• As of the end of the second quarter, the company held $17 million in cash and $18 million in receivables.
• The company plans to continue deleveraging its balance sheet with future free cash flow.

Operational Updates

• Bridger Aerospace is a leader in aerial firefighting, with a focus on initial attack and early response, capable of extinguishing fires of 50 acres quickly.
• The company operates a versatile fleet, including Super Scoopers that require only a mile of open water for operation.
• Bridger is managing the return to service of four Spanish scoopers, with two airworthy and two more expected to be operational by early 2026.

Future Outlook

• Bridger Aerospace anticipates high utilization rates due to government emphasis on early response to wildfires.
• The company is exploring expansion into European markets, targeting countries like Greece, Turkey, Portugal, and France.
• There is potential for acquiring surplus aircraft from the Department of Defense to expand service offerings.

Technological Advancement

• Bridger Aerospace has developed the Ignis app, providing real-time situational awareness for firefighting operations.
• Multi-mission aircraft are equipped with interchangeable sensor packages for wide-area mapping and command and control.
• The company’s technology allows for real-time thermal imagery and video to enhance firefighting efforts.

For a comprehensive understanding, readers are invited to refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - Canaccord Genuity’s 45th Annual Growth Conference:

Austin Moeller, Aerospace and Defense Analyst, Canaccord Genuity: Right. Hi, everyone. My name is Austin Moeller. I’m the aerospace and defense analyst here at Canaccord Genuity. And today, we are joined by Sam Davis and Eric Garrett, CEO and CFO of Bridger Aerospace.

So I guess, did you just want to go through a slide first and give a brief intro on the company for those that aren’t familiar?

Sam Davis, CEO, Bridger Aerospace: Would love to do that real quick. And I’ll keep it brief, but up on the screen you can see an overview of Bridger Aerospace. We’re headquartered in Bozeman, Montana, and we’re an aerial firefighting company. We were founded in 2014. We have three main service offerings.

We do suppression on fires with our Super Scoopers, which you can see on the screen. We do aerial surveillance for detection and surveillance over fires, and we also provide in house engineering for modification of aircraft that we use in house and in the defense sector. We have growing demand year over year with wildfires seen all across the nation. We’ve seen fires this year, unfortunately, in Palisades, which which grabbed national headlines. We were there to fight those fires.

All the way to the East Coast, we fought fires at Tennessee. Even Boston, you guys see smoke here quite frequently now. So the rising demand in wildfires has has necessitated aviation assets that are very scarce. Bridger has a unique opportunity to not only meet that demand, but to continue to grow and acquire these aircraft and get them into the market quickly to fill the unfulfilled demand orders out there. We have attractive economics.

As you can imagine, we find the increase in duration of contracts and multiyear contracts that we’ve been able to influence with our assets, both with legislation and obviously with the public scrutiny that happens with these fires so that our assets are being used more effectively as initial attack for pre positioning and being in the place to be most effective for how they’re built. I’ll just let you take off the questions.

Austin Moeller, Aerospace and Defense Analyst, Canaccord Genuity: Alright. Yeah. So how do you view your fleet of Super Scooper aerial firefighting planes today, and how do they compare to other aerial firefighting solutions like helicopters or c one thirties equipped with masks or chemical retardants?

Sam Davis, CEO, Bridger Aerospace: Right. Yeah. So we call our air you know, all airframes for firefighting are tools in the toolbox. There’s aircraft that drop retardant and aircraft that drop water for suppression. Retardant is a perimeter.

It forms a line that slows the progression and and diverts fire from going into areas that it’s not meant to. Water is the most effective direct attack or initial attack tool to suppress flames and slow the progression of fire. So with helicopters and with scoopers, we can drop water on fire. Helicopters, as you can imagine, are very concentrated, very effective for dropping directly on structures, preventing neighborhoods from burning and so on. But scoopers are specifically designed to repeatedly scoop and drop water and drop hundreds of thousands of gallons of water a day because they only need a couple fuel cycles to last a day.

So depending on the distance from a body of water, scoopers are extremely effective in positioning all over the country, to deploy on nearby fires, and and they only need about a mile of open water. The retardant based fixed wing aircraft are all tankers, and they need to land at an airport that not only is a big enough airport for them to land at, but, fill with a hose at a tanker base to fill with retardants. So, we’re way more versatile and effective, and in my mind, you know, it performs a different mission than retardant based planes or helicopters. So we differentiate very strongly from the other tools out there. Of the scoopers, we have six of the 10 in The US, so there’s only 10 total, And that’s where Bridger saw a unique opportunity to bring them into The US.

Their the CL aircraft or the Scooper aircraft are used worldwide, but have never been a staple or a household name in in The US until we really made it more of a of an expanded fleet here.

Austin Moeller, Aerospace and Defense Analyst, Canaccord Genuity: Can you discuss the size of your Super Scooper fleet versus the total number of that airplane type in North America and in Europe?

Sam Davis, CEO, Bridger Aerospace: Yeah. Great question. I just alluded to it. We have six here in The US. There were only roughly around 220 Canadian CL aircraft made, the scoopers.

And of that variant, roughly a 110 of them, I think it was a 150 actually, were turbine versions, which is the more modern version. It’s our belief that right around a 100 worldwide are only operational, and then of those 100, there’s only 10 that are privately owned. And so you can just see the filter gets down to us owning six of the 10. We can talk about it, I’m sure, in a minute, but there are four in Spain that became available that Bridger’s helping to manage the return to service to bring those into the private sector as well. So generally, a huge issue with scarcity and a growing need for in demand for this platform specifically and, you know, has never really existed in the private space, which is where we saw a unique entry point, and we’ve really seen the the demand or the aircraft themselves are increasing the demand as we grow.

Austin Moeller, Aerospace and Defense Analyst, Canaccord Genuity: And just on that point about the Spanish scoopers, what can you tell us about upgrade work that’s being undertaken on the Spanish scoopers as part of the MAB funding agreement? Could you go into a little bit more detail on that?

Sam Davis, CEO, Bridger Aerospace: Yeah. So two of the four aircraft over there are airworthy. The third one is is a few weeks away from getting its getting its airworthiness certification. And the fourth aircraft should be ready, I would say, early twenty twenty six. So timelines have moved a little bit as we’ve mostly solved around engine overhauls and finding the right parts because of, again, the scarcity of the airframe out in the market.

But but the management and return to service has gone really well. And, you know, you and I have talked about, Austin, about the, you know, the demand in Europe. You could see Greece is grabbing headlines today with the fires going on. France has been. We believe there’s quite a bit of demand, and I I still think the first two airworthy aircraft will get work this season.

As you can imagine, with this not even being a model in Europe in terms of company owned, company operated, there has to be a lot of groundwork done for the appropriation cycle to get these on contract. So right now, the entry point there is, under emergency funding with, aircraft that are disappearing from service over there. There have been a few incidents, unfortunately, that have happened this season. And so the public is now seeing CLs are available. Bridger, the Marathon Avenue Bridger agreement has provided these these opportunities for these scoopers to serve in the European market.

And so I think it’s just getting that message out there and getting the vehicle to get them work similar to what they’ve done in The US.

Austin Moeller, Aerospace and Defense Analyst, Canaccord Genuity: So last week, you reported earnings. How has the execution by your team during this latest fire season compared to the performance during previous normal fire seasons and also very active fire seasons?

Sam Davis, CEO, Bridger Aerospace: Yeah. Yeah. Good question. So, last year, I would say 2024 was was a good base year for Bridger in the fact that 2023, we had all six scoopers fully operational. It was our first full year of of operations, but it was an anomaly year because it was the slowest fire season in twenty five years in the in the Lower 48.

Canada was blowing up, we worked in Canada, but the provincial rates are are much less than here in The US. So 2024 for us was the first year where we we hit our stride in terms of utilization, and couldn’t have been more proud of the team. We had a record year. We were out in February and stayed out till November and saw high utilization rates across all of our fleet from surveillance to scoopers. This year, it was the January, we had a foot of snow on the ground in Bozeman, and we were rolling scoopers out to go to Palisades.

And it was then we knew that fires are year round. We need to manage the the team, and we had been preparing for year round activity, and that includes even doing maintenance cycles on our fleet to make sure we have aircraft available year round. So the utilization of our fleet is being changed by both public perception of fires being mismanaged, which I remain a little bit quiet on, but I will say that there are oftentimes when fires do not get actively responded to in the time where it’s critical. So we’ve seen a huge response from from all federal agencies to get onto fires early when it matters, when they can be turned or or suppressed. And the beauty of what Bridger does is for all of our aircraft, we are the the I I believe the premier asset for that initial attack, that early response phase, where pre positioned scoopers, for example, can be called up at a moment’s notice and put out a fire of 50 acres in an hour or two hours by dropping a few 100,000 gallons of So that initial attack early response mindset is being adopted by the federal government to prevent the next catastrophic event before you have Lahaina or Palisades fire or the Smokehouse Creek fire in Texas, which took out 1,100,000 acres in five days, when those fires can be acted on proactively early, and and our our planes and our team can do what they do well.

We’ve seen a huge change in the mindset as the the government has put those those tools in place. For example, this year alone, four of our scoopers are on one hundred and twenty day task orders, meaning they’re guaranteed work for a hundred and twenty days for all four of them, which we’ve never seen, just so they could be prepositioned wherever threats are high. So I call it, you know, the fire department in the sky. That mentality is really sinking in with their federal government. So all that being said, this year seems to be a average or even maybe a little bit below average here for the fire season, but we’ve never seen more days, more hours on our fleet, and we’ve never been out earlier.

And it looks like we might not ever be out later, just because of the mentality shift and how things are being managed.

Austin Moeller, Aerospace and Defense Analyst, Canaccord Genuity: And on that point, can you discuss the accelerated decision making activity at the Department of the Interior now that an executive order was issued and the Aerial Firefighting Enhancement Act was passed by Congress? How has that improved task order response times to dispatch aircraft relative to before when it would take days to get an order?

Sam Davis, CEO, Bridger Aerospace: Yeah. So the key point there is these guaranteed daily task orders or multi year contracts which have the the days guaranteed. Once those are guaranteed, we and Bridger don’t get a call in Bozeman under a call when needed contract saying, hey. Do you have an aircraft available? We’re already out in the field under the government control, and they know where there’s high threats anywhere from Utah to Arizona of fire danger.

So our our planes will be pre positioned. So that’s the first area that we see major changes is having our assets pre positioned. The second is how aircraft are being used, not just for suppression but for surveillance. They’re called up early. They’re called up when a fire starts to scoop and drop water immediately to to contain a fire when it’s 24 acres versus 75,000 acres.

An example is the Monroe Canyon fire in Utah right now. Last I checked, was 75,000 acres. There there are success stories that are happening that I haven’t seen happen historically where there was a spot fire that was in a canyon over that could have become the next Monroe Canyon fire, but our scoopers were on it within twenty minutes and put out 24 acres of fire. News reporters that knew the area and saw what we did were asking about it. So I see that as the evidence of success for that quick deployment and the decisions being made.

And my last comment there is, especially under the Department of the Interior, with the centralization of wildfire going to that agency, they’re much more progressive in their use of technology and in their concept of early response. We’ve seen already this year three examples where they’ve been live streaming to the secretary of the interior our plane over the Bravo Dragon fire in in on the Grand Canyon imagery of our of our camera fly or our our plane flying over that fire to show how effective that that command and control is. Also, they’re putting out on social media success stories of them intercepting and preventing fire. So a a very different look and feel from how fires are being managed. And then finally, the the indications they’ve been giving to us as a customer about how they’re thinking about the years to come, how to preposition us, how to put more hours on our airframe and and add more airframes to our contracts is something that usually doesn’t happen until much later in the year and more after appropriations are are completely finalized at that point.

Austin Moeller, Aerospace and Defense Analyst, Canaccord Genuity: Can you discuss the company’s recent sale leaseback of its hangar space and the reduction in its overall leverage by about 25%?

Sam Davis, CEO, Bridger Aerospace: Do you want to Yeah.

Eric Garrett, CFO, Bridger Aerospace: Sure. Yeah. So earlier this year, we announced that we’d entered into a sale leaseback arrangement with with a company to purchase our campus in Bozeman. So we’re located or co located at the Bozeman Airport, International Airport and have brand new hangars, brand new facilities that are pretty state of the art that have appreciated very significantly since we built them. So as we looked at this, we looked at it as an opportunity for us to monetize the appreciation in those assets.

It’s going to be proceeds of about $46,000,000 that we’re going to take and deliver to Austin’s point our balance sheet and our debt by about 25%. We’re going to lease back those facilities. Have a ten year lease, a pretty favorable lease for us to continue to remain on those facilities and operate from those facilities. But saw it as an opportunity to kind of leverage some pretty massive appreciation and delever our balance sheet.

Austin Moeller, Aerospace and Defense Analyst, Canaccord Genuity: What can you tell the audience about the recent trends in drying of forest fuels, less snowpack on mountains and its impact on fire activity, not only in the Mountain West, but also at higher latitudes like in Alaska?

Sam Davis, CEO, Bridger Aerospace: Yeah. That’s a great question. I think there’s three, kind of factors that are exacerbating, what we see with wildfires. One is just the general effects of of climate change that create hotter and drier conditions year over year, more prolonged seasons, and compounds the forest fuels out there, how fuels dry faster and so on. The second is how we manage or mismanage our forest where we don’t do enough preventative work.

I’m an outdoorsman, I live in the forest. Wish we did more to clear some of the undergrowth and put bodies on the ground to get rid of some of the old growth problems that we see, which, again, they they exacerbate the the intensity, the duration, and the size of the fires we see, which once they get, you know, to the size that we see with these mega fires, there’s literally nothing you can do. I mean, you can throw every aircraft out there, and and sometimes they just move so fast, they’ll, you know, they’ll jump roads, freeways even. You know, we saw in in Palisades where embers were traveling two miles and starting new spot fires. So once things get to that level, it’s almost too late.

And then the third and final thing is we see a lot of folks, especially with COVID, moving into what we call the wildland urban interface or the WUI, and that’s an industry term. But that’s where folks are moving out into these rural areas, and everybody wants to be up against a forest or in a forest, and it creates a lot of problems both with fire starting and then with, you know, what aviation assets have to deal with in terms of preventing homes from getting built rather than just dealing with a fire in the middle of nowhere. We see that sorry. We see that, you know, one of those three things compounding contributes to an even more of a greenhouse effect. Once you see these fires get to the makeup status, they put so much carbon into the atmosphere.

I think it’s on this slide, but, one of the fires, I think it was in 2020 in California, put off a 140,000,000, metric tons of carbon, something like that, which was more than the entire fleet of the California vehicles that year. Once you have that, the atmosphere literally can’t break it down or regenerate it, so it creates the next year or years to come even more of a climate effect. I think we see that inching its way up into the hemispheres and creating more large fires, drying more fuels, and so on. And this is Bridger trying to get ahead of that. Again, when when we can have that initial attack and that early response and suppression, we can really control, how big those fires get.

Austin Moeller, Aerospace and Defense Analyst, Canaccord Genuity: Can you talk a little bit about your multi mission aircraft and also about the Ignis app and what kinds of data are made available to firefighters from the multi mission aircraft to the Ignis app?

Sam Davis, CEO, Bridger Aerospace: Yeah, great question. So, specifically on our multi mission aircraft, we have the scoopers that are very in scarcity and high demand, and there’s a barrier to entry and a barrier to remain. On the multi mission aircraft, what we have there is Bridger is uniquely positioned to provide to the customer a system agnostic solution, whether it’s for whatever mission we want to give to them, we have the in house capabilities to get aircraft, get sensors, and turn them around in record time, whether it’s federal or state demands. So you can imagine if you want a a mission that you could fly and map a large area with what’s called a wide area mapping sensor or WAMI versus a a gimbal that can zoom in on on a one rooftop to do command and control, we can provide interchangeability on on any configuration out there. So right now, what we have with our Department of the Interior multi mission aircraft is we have PC twelves that can cover a large area, but they have interchangeability on their sensor package so we can fly what’s called an air attack mission with with government officials being able to look at firefighters, do backburns, put out spot fires if you see an ember travel.

Or we can we can map an area, a huge area, 250,000 acres in a few hours, and detect a thermal signature the size of a basketball from nine miles away that that is, you know, beneath a forest layer that the human eye might not see for days. So, the the span of what we can do with those multi mission aircraft is incredible for early detection and then for response during a fire. What our software does is it takes that imagery and it puts it on a desktop for an incident commander to view a split screen and to see real time thermal imagery, real time video, medium, short wave, long wave, infrared, to be able to look through smoke and see where a fire line is, thermal signature of firefighters on the ground to make sure that they’re safe, call in suppression so that we’re not dropping on firefighters or being effective where the flames are, not where the smoke is, and to do that in a way that gives them true situational, real time situational awareness. And it also exists on a mobile app, which exists in little parts and pieces in other software providers out there, but not in the way that we’re doing it as a fully integrated solution.

And then the the beautiful part of the Ignis solution that we’re gonna couple into our aviation contracts is that it allows, interactive features for that incident commander. The whole concept for the software through the founder that made it, he was a hotshot that jumped out of helicopters and fought fires on the ground, and he saw disasters of firefighters like the Urinal fire, where firefighters died because they didn’t know when direction had changed and nobody can contact them, and and they unfortunately perished. And he thought, what if I made a mobile app that can notify these firefighters with a repeater nearby that they need to get out, and here is your evacuation route? So, literally, the the incident commander could draw on there real time. Here’s evacuation routes.

Here’s the perimeter, and he could provide the imagery down to those firefighters. So if you went into a fire camp, which I encourage everybody to do, it’s interesting, but to this date, you’ll see big PDF maps on the wall with pins and pencil drawings of where things are. And the problem is is the technology the technology exists to be so disruptive and change how fire is done, and and we’re the ones that are uniquely positioned to get that into the the hands of firefighters. In fact, we we believe it’s part of our mission to, you know, save lives and property. So

Austin Moeller, Aerospace and Defense Analyst, Canaccord Genuity: Under the Aerial Firefighting Enhancement Act that was passed by congress, the DOD can now sell old surplus aircraft to private industry for firefighting. So if you were to procure aircraft from DOD, what specific aircraft would you be interested in?

Sam Davis, CEO, Bridger Aerospace: Yeah. So same answer for both those questions. Really, that impacts mostly the the helicopter market. Most rotor wings are the most effective former military aircraft to put onto fires, and Bridger Hat does have interest in in looking at the rotor wing market just because, like I explained, those are different tools in the toolbox. They’re very effective for spot fires, very effective to protect structures.

A lot of the type one or the heavy helicopters like Blackhawks, Chinooks, obviously, are military grade aircraft. So that really frees up those operators to get parts and to get airframes, which in the past has been a a problem. So it does change kind of what’s available out there and how to fight those fires. There’s a lot less than a fixed wing side, but definitely something that that changes the game and gives a little bit more opportunity for somebody like Richard.

Austin Moeller, Aerospace and Defense Analyst, Canaccord Genuity: So given that there’s four Spanish scoopers in Europe that you are doing upgrade work on, What specific countries are you potentially targeting for contracts either during this fire season or next fire season? Yep. Really, where’s the demand at in Europe?

Sam Davis, CEO, Bridger Aerospace: Yeah. You can just flip flip on the news, although it’s hard to get international news sometimes, or read headlines. Greece, Turkey, Portugal I just was on a phone call about Portugal, and they’ve had a lot of airframes drop out, either through incidents. France, you know, all of the European countries have the problem of CL aircraft being the household name, but a lot of those airframes are dropping out of the service, both from staffing issues, parts issues, and you have old piston aircraft that are no longer, you know, supported or flyable. So that demand and what we see in grabbing headlines in terms of the fire and the intensity over in Europe, that’s only a handful of the countries that we’re talking to that, again, they’re in the middle of this.

It’s grabbing headlines. They have, you know, typical appropriation cycles that they’ll have to get behind. But, right now, there there are states of emergency going on that I think that’ll dictate, you know, some of the countries I listed looking for these assets.

Austin Moeller, Aerospace and Defense Analyst, Canaccord Genuity: I think just the last question here. Can you discuss your cash balance here relative to your needs for the existing fleet and what you’ve looked at in terms of financing options?

Eric Garrett, CFO, Bridger Aerospace: Yeah. So so we just announced the second quarter last week. So at the end of the second quarter, we have about 17,000,000 of available cash, which is that that’s a kind of our low point because we’re coming out of our heavy maintenance in the wintertime and the fire year is really just starting to ramp up. So we ended the quarter with about $17,000,000 in cash. We have about $18,000,000 in receivables already.

So you’ll see typically for us, you’ll see our cash now build out until probably November, December. But certainly more than sufficient for, you know, all of our aircraft, all of all of the the things that we’re doing, whether it be on the software side or or on the aircraft side to maintain and get those ready with some additional free cash flow that at this point, we’ll be looking to continue to delever our balance sheet. But yes, typically, our cycle is May, June is the kind of the low point in our cash, and then it builds up through December as we get through the the fire year and and collect those receivables.

Austin Moeller, Aerospace and Defense Analyst, Canaccord Genuity: Great. Well, that brings us to the end of our time today. So thank you so much, Sam and Eric, for coming to talk to us about aerial firefighting and and Bridger Aerospace.

Sam Davis, CEO, Bridger Aerospace: Appreciate it. Thank you.

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