Conference Transcript - BAER 2026-08-11

Sam Davis, CEO

I guess I'll get started.

Austin Mohler, Analyst — Canon Core Genuity

Hi, everybody. I'm Austin Mohler. I'm the Senior Aerospace and Defense Technology Analyst here at Canon Core Genuity. And today we are joined by Sam Davis of Bridger Aerospace, who's going to talk to us a little bit about aerial firefighting. So, Sam, if you could just start off and tell us a little bit about the company.

Sam Davis, CEO

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you, Austin. Pleasure to be with you. I think I should extend an invitation to Bozeman, Montana, for a fireside chat by wildfire sometime. I think that would be pretty disruptive, right?

Austin Mohler, Analyst — Canon Core Genuity

We should do it on the plane.

Sam Davis, CEO

On the plane, yes, yeah, next time. Sam Davis, CEO of Bridger Aerospace, we're headquartered in Bozeman, Montana, the heart of wildfire country. We're an aerial firefighting company. We deal with suppression and surveillance. You know, used to be on the East Coast when we'd visit, we'd have to explain the business and what was impacted, but it seems to no longer be a mystery, especially with the smoke and the long-lasting effects and what you guys have already seen this year, the necessary need for what we do and how it's growing year over year and the effects of climate impact that we see. So we have the largest privately-owned fleet of super scoopers in the world. These aircraft are built to scoop and drop water continuously on fire and provide that overhead suppression for ground forces and allow other aircraft to get in and do their work. And we also have a substantial fleet of innovative sensor-enhanced aircraft that provide real-time situational awareness, and we're introducing those with new capabilities and coupling with our proprietary software. Our goal is to save, our mission is to save lives, property, and the environment threatened by wildfire. So it influences everything we do. We pride ourselves on operating all over the country and continuing to introduce the most advanced technology into firefighting.

Austin Mohler, Analyst — Canon Core Genuity

So, Sam, could we talk a little bit about the capabilities of your fleet, the Super Scoopers versus the multi-mission aircraft, the MMA?

Sam Davis, CEO

Yeah, yeah. So the Super Scooper, which is up on the screen, the yellow and red aircraft, those are purpose-built water-scooping aircraft built for firefighting. They can scoop and drop water continuously on a full tank of fuel, which is about a four-hour cycle. Typically, they fly in pairs. They can mobilize nearly anywhere. They're short takeoff and landing aircraft, so very versatile and can provide even hundreds of thousands of gallons of water in a day to a wildfire. They're extremely high demand. We see that there was a very unmet capacity here in the U.S. for scoopers, so we own six of the ten that are located here, and all of those are on a federal contract, and every year we see the demand for them increase. Because they're so unique, they're on a standalone contract with only four of our competitors' aircraft. We have just recently bought two of them. They're located in Spain. They're flying right now in Portugal to increase our fleet to eight total and potential ability to acquire more of them as they get decommissioned and we can repurpose them from governments. The flagship of the company, they are, like I said, in high demand and high utilization, so I've been very accretive in what they've been able to produce for our growth. And the mode around them is they're hard to get, hard to operate, and require a lot of expertise in a big infrastructure, which we excel at. The surveillance aircraft we have are just as disruptive to the industry, but the moat around them is our integrated services that we have to modify and produce the engineering capabilities to put sensors on aircraft. Right now, we're on federal fires, and we're doing live stream capabilities down to the ground, perimeter mapping, fire modeling even, and giving that real-time situational awareness to incident commanders, ground firefighters, and so on. We're bringing military-grade technology that's existed for decades into wildfire for the first time, and combining it with the most high-performing aircraft out there so that we can get the most efficient high-loader time, and as well, you know, economic ability to give intelligence to incident commanders.

Austin Mohler, Analyst — Canon Core Genuity

Can you discuss how the fire season has gotten longer and how government agencies have been rewarding you progressively longer and longer and longer task orders to go out and attack fires during the year?

Sam Davis, CEO

So unfortunately, you know, they say it takes a disaster to make change happen. We've seen year over year the headlines grabbing national news, the smoke in the air. We saw Smokehouse Creek fire in Texas, which was over a million acres, wiped out 22,000 cattle in Texas. We saw the Palisades fire that took out billions in homes and was, I think, 22,000 acres in January of last year. The Maui fires that happened as well. So those headlines are grabbing attention, as they should be, and growing, unfortunately, more frequent every year. And we see that as kind of a three-pronged result of increased temperatures, fuel loads that are continuing to not be managed appropriately, or we can't manage them enough. And finally, people moving into wildfire-prone areas, which is creating problems. So that has created a lot of attention, as there should be, on how wildfire is managed. And the agencies have looked to how they fix this problem with a scarcity of aviation assets. And therefore, they've leaned more into commitments. In the early days of Scoopers, when we brought our first two of six into the U.S., we had pure call when needed contracts where we would sit and wait for the phone to ring. And a very expensive aircraft with a staff on standby waiting for work was not truly sustainable. And now, as of this year, we have four of our six in the U.S. on a 160-day task order, which was a major milestone for us. And then our two Spain scoopers, which are in Portugal, are on a 90-day task order, which are evidence of that long-term commitment that you mentioned that we see.

Austin Mohler, Analyst — Canon Core Genuity

And can you just, for the audience, talk about the revenue and margin opportunity of, like, exclusive use versus call-unneeded contracts, what the difference is?

Sam Davis, CEO

Right, great question. So exclusive use contracting means we're guaranteed to work for a certain number of days, and that's a very deep part of our strategy, and we've methodically improved that year after year across our fleet. That is the guaranteed portion of our revenue on a rate. We don't publish our rates, but on a rate basis, that's about half of our revenue on a normal year. and we've moved to our four of our six in the U.S. being on a guaranteed day task order and eight of our nine surveillance aircraft are committed for multi-year guaranteed days so very effective and then as a I would like to take credit for being this this brilliant but we've seen the upside of way more hours being used as the variable part of our revenue the more we're committed and what we've realized is we're the best out there in terms of highly efficient initial attack is what it's called direct attack with fire when we're pre-positioned when we're in the hands of incident commanders and scooper managers and air attack professionals we're used we're out there in the field nobody's checking a budget they're flying us and so we have a lot more upside potential as we continue to work on that guaranteed portion of our revenue so the super scooper is a purpose-built water bomber aircraft which means that it dumps water on the fire.

Austin Mohler, Analyst — Canon Core Genuity

Can you talk about why a water bomber or the super scooper in general is superior to other firefighting aircraft that dump chemical retardant on the fire?

Sam Davis, CEO

Yeah, great question. One of the biggest things we like to champion internally, because it's a big part of our culture, is safety. So it's a purpose-built aircraft, over-engineered. It's a giant boat on wings. It hits the water at 100 miles an hour. And if you go look at the worldwide wide safety record of these for decades. They're highly safe aircraft for an extremely dangerous mission. So we have about 60-some pilots, 66 pilots out there flying every day and at night. I don't get much sleep. Knowing that these are the safest aircraft out there and highly effective is a huge part of why we lean into them. They're very effective because they can deploy anywhere. They're highly versatile. They're short takeoff and landing. They can perform in high mountainous terrain, deserts. We had them in the Everglades this year, which was interesting, in Alaska. And they can operate even on unimproved runways if needed because they, again, just need to scoop and drop water and need to land about once a day to refuel. We follow them around with mechanics, pilots that are all Bridger employees, what we call mobile repair units, which are trucks and trailers so that they can stay deployed the entire season. And now a season is less of a thing as were out here around.

Austin Mohler, Analyst — Canon Core Genuity

Can we talk about the lease agreement that you have for two of the Spanish scoopers with the Vinci's and when that expires and then if North America is looking like a more attractive market right now for those planes?

Sam Davis, CEO

Yeah, great question. So we acquired two retired military Spanish aircraft scoopers, helped return them to service as part of a JV, and we bought the first two out of the JV, the three and four are remaining, to be returned to service. We acquired those in December of last year. As a part of a refinance, we had a deferred draw and were able to acquire them and expand our fleet. But with the time it would have taken to ferry them here in the winter, equip them for the fire season, which requires some investment in coordination with the local federal agencies, we decided it was best to leave them in Europe and have them work for a year there, and quite honestly see what contract opportunities presented themselves. Avinci's is our partner in Europe, an incredible team, and I call them the bridger of Europe. I think it's a compliment to them. They have flight ops and maintenance, and we coordinated with them to get these two on contract. It's committed as of mid-July through mid-October, which is great, as a dry lease, and that's passed through to us, But it's about half of what I need for those aircraft, and quite honestly, it's very evident that, you know, these planes are probably better served in the U.S. As we see unfilled task orders or unable to fill requests come in for scoopers as high as, you know, 48 percent here in the U.S. and the economics with the scoopers and the demand we see, we're convincing ourselves that these need to come back to the U.S. and fight fire. It's unfortunate because in the U.S. where the scooper was a new platform but private operations were not, they're the norm around here. The scooper is the accepted plane in Europe and in Canada, but private contracting does not exist, so it's the opposing views there. But with what we've seen in Spain and Portugal, Greece, Italy this year, France, it's evident that they're a little bit behind in their commitment.

Austin Mohler, Analyst — Canon Core Genuity

Can we just talk a little bit about Bridger's balance sheet, the preferred stock and capacity available to purchase the two remaining Spanish scoopers that you're doing maintenance overhaul work on?

Sam Davis, CEO

Yeah, great question. So last year we had two mandates. One was deliver on our results, as we do every year, operationally, and come home safe. And then the second was to work on our balance sheet. So we went through a refinance, campus sale and lease back, and acquired a deferred draw loan facility for $100 million to go buy aircraft and expand. We used that to go buy two Spain scoopers, sorry, and we brought on two King Airs to the fleet. We still have remaining about 75 million to go buy a new aircraft and put them on contract. And we see opportunities both in suppression and surveillance for that on-contract growth and find that those planes are immediately accretive and help ultimately deliver us in a short amount of time. So that's one of the vehicles we have to continue to grow and improve our overall balance sheet health. You mentioned the preferred. The preferred is currently picking at 6%. That increases to 9% next year. But we do have the ability to start to pay that down, and we do see that as kind of, I believe it's an overhang that's disproportionately putting pressure on our common, but it's a very big part of our strategy moving forward to improve kind of as a next step on our balance sheet.

Austin Mohler, Analyst — Canon Core Genuity

What parts are needed? Like, you've got two Spanish scoopers that you're still working on in Spain that could be brought into service.

Sam Davis, CEO

What parts are needed for scooper number four? because I guess you have to buy the two planes in a pair yeah yeah so aircraft three is near airworthy which is great but they operate in pairs a lot of times they're contracted in pairs so we don't typically want to buy one alone aircraft four was missing some parts that we now have a line of sight on I'm not a mechanic or amy but they were like a prop control gauge and ITT gauges that have since been defunct from the manufacturing line but we've been working closely with de Havilland who's starting the 515 production line and symbiotically for us as they start that about 98% of the parts are compatible with their current fleet and even the T1s that we have in Spain. So we do have a line of sight with those to get those operational as soon as next year.

Austin Mohler, Analyst — Canon Core Genuity

Excellent. What opportunities are available for Bridger to potentially become a commercial firefighting vendor in Canada?

Sam Davis, CEO

Yeah, so we have operated in Canada, and this was in 2023 when they had some record fires then. We kind of went under a FAOC, Foreign Air Operator Certificate, to operate our N-registered aircraft there and moved literally across the provinces as the fires did and made some revenue for Bridger and help support Canada at the time. We did it at highly discounted rates because, like I mentioned, in the US where private operating is the norm, in Europe and in Canada they're all provincial and country-owned fleets, so that was a very difficult thing for them to pay for a private operator to do what they do well. We are continuing to explore what that looks like and talking to provinces and potentially looking at setting up you know subsidiary or operating through a established operator there as an AOC that can help us lease and move aircraft across the border I will say just as we've mentioned about 30 to 40 percent of our our pilots are Canadian so obviously they they really want to support their their home country and go back but unfortunately now the peak of the season is is kind of overlapping where I think one of our strategies there would be to kind of match typically when their season is, which is in Q2, before we pick up here in Q3.

Austin Mohler, Analyst — Canon Core Genuity

Right, because a lot of those planes are locked up on long-term agreements.

Sam Davis, CEO

Long-term agreements, correct, yep.

Austin Mohler, Analyst — Canon Core Genuity

Do you expect the cash generated in Q3 to be sufficient for completing the maintenance work in the off-season?

Sam Davis, CEO

Yes, we do. We had to pull upon our deferred draw, which is a great facility to have because we poured a lot of investment into our aircraft this season. And when we're in the off-season, we were burning through that cash that we had from 2025. But we're typically in Q3 as we ramp up and get 60%, 70% of our revenue for the last half of the year. We get in a very strong cash position going into the end of December, so we have that projected. And then we'll use that again to invest back into the business, the CapEx. We still, like I mentioned, have the deferred draw for acquiring aircraft sensors and potentially suppression aircraft, which we definitely will capitalize on. It's kind of as fast as Bridger can move to go after that new work that we see develop.

Austin Mohler, Analyst — Canon Core Genuity

And can you just comment on how the 120-day and the 90-day task orders that you have right now in the U.S. and in Europe, it should lengthen the fire season for you and you'll probably generate more revenue than expected in Q4 because you'll be going into October and November.

Sam Davis, CEO

Yeah, right. So an anomaly if I'm looking year over year because this is something that I lay awake at night thinking about. Last year we had the Palisades fire in January which was unusual but we earned revenue in Q1 and then we had some non-fire training operations that are classified that we used or we got revenue in Q2 that was not recurring. This year, we saw a decent Q1 and Q2 as expected, but if you look at the agency's strategy and the Wildland Fire Service Fire Chief was on a podcast the other day where he said they knew going into the year with low snowpack, high temps, and they experienced, we all experienced kind of a wet spring in June. They held on to a lot of those task orders and affected them so that they stayed with committed aircraft through Q4, which is great for us. But for us, it means that 2026 is shifting a lot of that commitment into Q4. And by way of example, I looked at our scoopers last year, and only one pair was out through October and saw very little flight hours because it was a fairly below average fire year, to be honest. This year we'll have a pair out through the end of October and a pair out through the end of November guaranteed. And like I said, we're seeing some pretty strong flight hours right now with all the activity we see going on. Super El Nino is going to supposedly impact the weather moving into the winter and continued drought conditions, so we're prepared and trained and positioned for a year-round deployment. i was wondering if you could talk about the ignis app and what agencies are already paying for it under contract and how might it be deployed as a revenue generating product with the local firefighting agencies nationwide yeah no that's great i'm really excited about this um it's actually surpassed my vision and my expectations this year so we have a proprietary app that was built by a rappel guy who jumped out of helicopters fighting fire in the ground, and his heart and mission was for ground firefighters who get separated from their crews, don't know what's changing, and unfortunately have died in the front lines, so he designed a mobile app, Bridger acquired it, and we started to push it to market, but realized, one, I want to keep it free for firefighters, two, how do we couple it into aviation contracts as way to introduce it to the market and keep it proprietary to what we do with our with our sensor planes so this year we were able to combine it into an existing federal contract with the Department of the Interior and I have an incredible team of developers who are using artificial intelligence and creating features faster than I can comprehend but right now we're committed through the end of the year with the software as a service and it's delivering our imagery, real-time video, perimeter mapping, fire modeling, ground resource tracking, which is very dear to our hearts. We want to know where these ground crews are when they're fighting fire. And it's giving it to incident commanders that are sitting in a tent with a desktop. It's giving it to mobile phones with ground firefighters, and all built around an incident. So the beauty of it is we have an API where we can ingest any amount of data, whether it's drones. We're partnering with a satellite company. So you can have that real-time situational awareness. And if you're a volunteer firefighter in the state of Texas, you can show up and I can give you a QR code. You can scan and be in the incident and see our plane overhead and everything on the ground that you need to know. So super excited about how disruptive this is and how fast we got it to market. We have had overnight 20,000 users in it. Most of them are firefighters and and fire teams, and I think there's 27,000 firefighters deployed right now. So wildly successful at the federal level, and we're just scratching the surface of what this could be. And you asked about a standalone contract. We're going after states and local agencies to get this into the hands of incident command teams so that they can coordinate with their own crews and import and ingest their own data, whether it's drones that they own or have or other solutions for an aerial surveillance side of things, not just bridge or planes. Last comment I make, we love that this is unique and proprietary to our aviation contracts, so something that we're using is kind of another moat for us and giving us a little bit of that proprietary edge. It's increasing our utilization with our planes. We're getting specifically ordered up for Ignis, our software. And then finally, we're just tapping the market of what this could be on a standalone basis for us.

Austin Mohler, Analyst — Canon Core Genuity

I want to talk a little bit about the scarcity of your assets. When might De Havilland Canada have more planes available to purchase, just given the extremely long waiting list that multiple sovereign governments are in line for? And are they planning to increase production capacity in their plant, considering everyone would love to have one of these?

Sam Davis, CEO

Yeah, yeah. I always do my research before I talk to you on this one because I need to see where they're at. They're targeting 2028 for the production of the new 515 platform. This has been shifting right. We love to have one. They're great partners of us. But it's been slower to producing a mass production of these scoopers. They're in high demand worldwide. Just a few days ago, they joined the fuselage to the cockpit, so they're making strides. But with the 20-plus orders that are all accounted for by provinces and countries, it's my personal opinion that these are going to be well into the 2030s before they become available to private operators like Bridger. And at that, at a pretty hefty price tag, so we are looking for what else is out there for a suppression asset to fill this demand because it is a definite scarcity. We benefit from that right now with the utilization we see in the high demand on the scoopers we have, but it does create a little bit of a capacity that, you know, especially during the peak of the season where, like I mentioned, there's some unfilled task orders that we're not able to pick up.

Austin Mohler, Analyst — Canon Core Genuity

On that same point, are you able to talk about the number of flight hours you can log on each aircraft type during the year before they have to go into maintenance?

Sam Davis, CEO

Yeah. For the scoopers, we have a C-check at 500 hours. These do not have D-checks like commercial airlines where they're completely dismantled. They have A and B and C-checks, and A and Bs typically can be done even while they're deployed, and they can be done in phased approaches. Because they're purpose-built aircraft and they're engineered for this, it was built into their program that they can be deployed and go through these phased inspections with only the C-check being kind of that end of the season. There are extensions that we can do with the OEM, and we've seen some of our planes come close to that, so we get extensions on an ad hoc basis. But what we've gotten really good at is staggering our fleet because we know we're going to have year-round activity, and there are months where every single plane is flying and flying as many hours as it can. But we know as those planes that get deployed first come due, We'll pull them down towards the slower months and rotate them, which becomes an easier problem as we have eight and hopefully ten scoopers to help manage that. Very proud of the team. We have a very adept team at what they do. They're quick at their inspections, and we can do all of that in-house with our certified repair station. And we can also do a lot of it on the road with our trucks and trailers.

Austin Mohler, Analyst — Canon Core Genuity

Do I have any questions from the audience about aerial firefighting?

Sam Davis, CEO

I live in Miami, you mentioned Everglades, yeah, yeah, great question, I love this one, I usually don't go into it because I burn up too much time, I'm glad you asked. So we have a team that maps out lakes, and we'll a lot of times work with local agencies for nearby bodies of water, and there's some criteria going into it we need. We need about a mile of open water, we only need about six inches of depth for the probes, You can see just barely skimming the water, and it takes about 10 to 12 seconds to fill a 1,400-gallon tank. So what really is important is we have, in our standard operating procedures, we need about six to nine feet of depth. There has to be a certain level of turbidity below which we cannot scoop or above which, I should say. And there needs to be clearance, no power lines, enough area to take off. We have some pretty hot shot pilots. A lot of them are former combat fighters, but they're very safe, and so they know those conditions. Going into an area, though, just like with drones, my public safety announcement, there are a lot of people that are on jet skis that chase us down to get the selfies, the Instagram reels. So a lot of times we'll coordinate with local sheriff departments and clear waterways and make sure we have those paths to scoop because you can imagine an over 12,000-pound aircraft, or 24,000-pound aircraft, I think it is, moving at 100 miles an hour, how dangerous of a mission it is. Actually, it's more technically difficult for these guys to scoop water than drop it on the fires a lot of times. So a very coordinated effort, and we do study lake maps and make sure we go very well-prepared into areas. um and then my last comment it's similar to the drone incursions we see i believe the fires in spokane saw 27 drone incursions in one day and it shuts down an entire uh tfr flight restricted area and an entire fire operation unfortunately um while homes are burning down so we have to be very careful with what goes on you know in the general public too what does your feet well uh now more than ever we still are operational so uh it's just not as many of our planes are out but we have been out since february of this year doing surveillance looks like we're going to at least be out till november with our scoopers if you guys ever come visit bozeman montana come by the hangar but that's when everybody's home and we're tearing aircraft apart we're putting sensors on planes that's our heavy winter maintenance cycle that's when we're investing in in the next equipment and technology so it's all hands on deck we're getting prepared for for the next season amazing well thanks so much Sam for coming to give us the latest on Bridger Aerospace and great to have you awesome thank you so much