Aerial Firefighting Fleet for Wildfire Suppression: A System of Systems Approach

Kurzfassung

This study documents the design, development, and evaluation of a purpose-built aerial firefighting fleet optimized for diverse wildfire suppression environments as part of the COLOSSUS projects X-Challenge. The multidisciplinary effort encompassed aerodynamic design, propulsion system, systems integration, cost estimation, simulation, design of experiments, and fleet optimization. Key technical advancements include a conceptual design of a hybrid eVTOL aircraft, and the integration of a Series Hybrid Propulsion model into the SoSiD simulation toolkit. Simulation results indicate that the proposed aircraft achieves competitive or superior effectiveness across all test scenarios, with the series hybrid configuration offering notable endurance, and tactical adaptability.