From a hangar in St. Paul, engineers have spent this spring turning single-engine cropdusters into water-scooping seaplanes, giving fire crews a quicker way to attack northern Minnesota wildfires. The Heatwave float-and-scoop system fills an 800-gallon tank in seconds and is built to reduce the hazards pilots face during water pickups. Test pilots say the setup smooths the plane’s handling on the water and slashes turnaround times between drops.
Momentum Aeronautics, headquartered in St. Paul, says the system won Federal Aviation Administration supplemental type-certificate approval in October 2025 and received EASA validation in April 2026. The company designed Heatwave for the single-engine Air Tractor 802A and says its floats feature a “single-scoop-safe” design and forward structural reinforcement to better absorb wave impacts. Momentum Aeronautics also notes that delivery slots for 2026 are sold out as production ramps up.
The floats funnel water into an 800-gallon tank so planes can make many quick drops. Momentum Aeronautics’ founder has said water-scooping aircraft can perform up to 25 runs an hour, compared with about two runs an hour for land-based refill operations. The business is delivering five Heatwave systems this year and expects to produce 12 or more annually by 2028, according to reporting by the Star Tribune. The Air Tractor remains the base aircraft that the floats attach to, expanding a model already used in crop-dusting and aerial firefighting.
Pilots, Training And Early Clients
One early customer is Coastal Air Strike, a Florida-based contractor that has planes and pilots staged in Hibbing and Brainerd to support Minnesota wildfire response, a company official told CBS Minnesota. “It scoops a lot faster, but the safety factor with the way the scoop is designed … is just a lot more manageable,” Coastal chief pilot Aaron Vince said. Colby Smith, a trainer who worked with the floats, said, “You’re kind of fighting this airplane, kind of bouncing off its nose and off the tail,” and that the new design removes many of those tendencies. Five pilots were trained on the system this year, the Star Tribune reported.
Why Minnesota Matters
Water-scooping is especially useful in Minnesota because lakes are plentiful and spring fires can move quickly. Two recent blazes, the Stewart Trail and Flanders fires, together burned roughly 2,000 acres and forced evacuations this month. The Stewart Trail Fire near Two Harbors burned several hundred acres and destroyed dozens of structures, MPR News reported, and incident commanders tracked the Flanders blaze near Breezy Point on the state’s incident site. State meteorologists with the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency forecast 12 to 16 days of wildfire-smoke impacts this summer, which raises the value of faster aerial response…