06/16/2026
A team at the University of Glasgow’s James Watt School of Engineering has developed complex simulation software which, for the first time, accurately models the real-time interaction between an aircraft and the wildfire it is fighting.
The University of Glasgow’s Professor George Barakos, Dr. Tao Zhang, and postgraduate student Oyedoyin Dada, along with Dr. Lu You of China’s Guizhou University, recently published their game-changing work in A framework for aerial firefighting simulation, a paper published in the CEAS Aeronautical Journal.
Barakos has a special interest in the numerical and physical simulation of flows, especially in terms of rotary wings, including helicopter and eVTOL rotors, tiltrotors, and wind turbines. Meanwhile, the James Watt School of Engineering boasts a generic flight simulator, known as Daedalus I. Combined with Barakos’ vivid experience of wildfires in his native Greece, he found the prospect of modelling helicopter interactions with fires an attractive challenge.
Mounted on a six-degrees-of-freedom motion platform, Daedalus I includes a dome for 270-degree visuals and replica helicopter controls. Dada explained its versatility from the erstwhile instructor’s station: “The system is fully integrated and as we develop the program, we can simply switch the flight model and controls to suit different aircraft, including fixed-wing.”
The fire simulation element currently sits alongside Daedalus I, running on a separate computer and essentially inserting graphics and flight behavior into the ‘regular’ simulation. Mindful that high costs could be a barrier to widescale introduction, the Glasgow team runs its software using the Nvidia RTX 4090 graphics card of a commercially available gaming PC.
Full story: https://runwaygirlnetwork.com/2026/06/simulation-breakthrough-could-spark-aerial-firefighter-training-revolution/
