Hi, good morning, everyone. My name is Austin Moeller. I'm the sustainability analyst here at Canaccord Genuity. Today we're joined by management of Bridger Aerospace, and so, Sam, I know you wanted to, to give an overview of the company for, just to get everyone familiarized on aerial firefighting. Absolutely, yeah. Thanks to everybody for joining, and it's an honor to be here today. I'm Sam Davis, the CEO of Bridger Aerospace, accompanied by John Saunders, our SVP of Capital Markets. Just gonna give you an overview of the company, our history, where we're headed. Wildfire is a big thing on the West Coast, especially. I think you guys are gonna get some smoke today, I've heard. So everybody has been affected by wildfire. That's what the company is founded upon. We're based out of Bozeman, Montana. And if we could skip to kind of the history or the timeline of the company. Oh, right, here. Uh, yeah. Sorry about that. Bridger was founded in 2014 by a former Navy SEAL who had served in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. While serving overseas, he was directly affected by either the lack of aerial support or supported by it, and knew that when he came back to the U.S., he wanted to take some of the technology, advantage of the technology in the private space, and he founded kind of two sister companies at the time. One, Ascent Vision Technologies, which was focused on anti-drone technology to counter terrorists, and also putting some of that equipment, sensor equipment, onto aircraft. It morphed into a firefighting business because we're based in Bozeman, Montana, and wildfire is all over our backyard. So, the aerial firefighting part of the business started with surveillance, command and control in the sky. Using military-grade sensors, we're able to detect thermal hotspots, map perimeters, and give real-time information to government officials to combat wildfire. It's a very combat intense mission. Tim, our founder, saw an opportunity to bring into the U.S. what's called Super Scooper, CL-415EAFs, which is the yellow and red aircraft you see on the screen. Those aircraft are the only fixed-wing purpose-built aircraft that fight fire. They scoop and drop water continuously as long as they have a full tank of fuel, and we believe are the best tool in the market for the job. They've been used by Canada and other countries to suppress wildfire, and the key, the key part is they drop water, and they provide ground support or cover for ground support and ground crews to get in and combat wildfires, which is one of the biggest challenges for firefighters on the ground, heavy equipment and so on. Those are the flagship of the company. We acquired six of them. We now have four being returned to service in Spain, and there's only four in the U.S. that are located in Washington. So, so we've only met part of the demand, and those planes are all out working and working hard this summer. The last one, two were received in 2022 and have been working since. We were listed on the NASDAQ in Q1 of 2023 on a SPAC. We've acquired Ignis Technologies, which is a software application for firefighters on the ground. We just closed at the end of June the acquisition of a aerospace engineering modification company, FMS Aerospace, out of Huntsville, Alabama. And we're continuing to expand both our organic and inorganic growth as a company. John, I don't know if there I missed anything there. No, that's good. Okay. I touched on a lot of this, but, you know, obviously, we're a full-spectrum aerial firefighting solution. We're bringing, again, military-grade technology into the firefighting space. Wildfires are not stopping in their intensity, duration, and the ability to prevent, detect, and suppress what's happening. And the government and state and local agencies are becoming more and more aware of the need for combating this in a much different fashion, as we see the expansion of folks moving into what's called the Wildland-Urban Interface, the WUI. And so we see the addressable market only increasing over time. Yeah, I would just jump in to talk about a little bit about the population flows. You know, we're out of Bozeman, Montana. We've seen some of the most significant population flows into Boise and Bozeman, Montana, from the West Coast and the East Coast. We're seeing tremendous number of folks moving into the Mountain West and building expensive homes backed up to national forests, the wildland-urban interface. And so the billions of dollars of new property that is at the edge of the wilderness is one of the things that's driving more federal budget appropriations for this, because we will let fires burn in the core part of a wilderness until the snow falls and burns out the fire, but as the fires begin to encroach on property and people, the government comes in and spends money to fight those assets. So what we're seeing is incredible growth in homes and population in the Wildland-Urban Interface, as well as increased severity and increased duration of wildfires in the Mountain West. Right. That's an excellent point. So the demand is being driven by the conditions in the environment, climate change. Also, these aircraft and Bridger's position as the only publicly traded aerial firefighting company out there, and the technology we employ creates its own demand, specifically with our Scoopers, our technology, equipped aircraft, and not really a market that many can enter in the space due to the barriers of entry of the high cost, cost of capital that we've accomplished already. I'll jump ahead here, you know, to what the Scooper specifically can do. This is a neat overview of what these aircraft can do. They're short takeoff and landing, or STOL aircraft that can provide air cover at high altitudes. They can scoop and land on a mile of open water, which is surprisingly all over the United States. We operate from Alaska to Texas. We were in Texas in February this year. These, these planes are highly mobile, and we have a, an entire ground crew that follows them around. So, anywhere in Canada or the U.S., we can fight fires, and obviously we're expanding into to overseas as well. The core strategy of the business is sort of differentiation. There's only one other operator of Super Scoopers or water bombers in the United States. Everybody else operates what's called a large air tanker that dumps suppression foams, so retardant instead of water. There are some environmental impacts of that retardant against water. Also, those are converted commercial airlines. This is a purpose-built firefighting aircraft that has the ability to descend at rates and ascend at rates that are far higher and steeper than any commercial airline that's currently in operation. It also goes to speak to the technology we've deployed in some of our early detection and prevention aircraft. We have integrated EO/IR sensors, as well as other types of sophisticated sensors, to be able to map and detect fires early. Bridger has always focused on bringing new technology into an industry that has historically been led by small, privately owned family businesses whose fleet of aircraft have not changed much over the last 60 years. Yep. I'll skip ahead here. What's going on with my, t here we go. Just talking a little bit about the climate change and the effect we see on wildfires across the U.S. again, it may be not as prevalent on the East Coast, but fires are increasing in intensity and duration. Anybody can go out to the National Interagency Fire Center and look at the statistics of how many wildfires, the large wildfires that are happening. And large wildfires are significant because they become what's called uncontained or out of control. When you're at that point, you need the biggest, most effective tools out there, which are what we believe we have. What we have for the Scooper, specifically, they operate in pairs. They can drop Just in Idaho alone, I was there for one week, and we had two Scoopers drop 1 million gallons of water in some pretty intense conditions. They were spotting fires as they were starting from lightning strikes while they were happening. Again, maybe far removed, but over on the West Coast, everybody, especially California, makes national headlines every year. This is a growing problem, and as John said, more and more people are moving out into the wildland-urban interface, where their homes are at danger. They can't insure homes because of wildfires, and Bridger has the solution. The average large number of fires I mentioned, the WUI area expanding, and the acres burned, again, is a good indicator year-over-year of how much is consumed every year. One thing that I think that's a good education piece for people is if you think about public land out there, you think, "Well, how much can burn?" Really, there's millions and millions and millions of acres in the U.S. and Canada. And one, you know, million-acre fire might burn one year, but that forest will regrow, and even those are. There's a lot of prevention dollars out there. Literally, the government doesn't have a solution for clearing out enough old-growth forest and doing the prevention work that they need to do, although the intent and is there. Again, with our technology, we believe that we have the eye in the sky for early detection and prevention, and we're seeing states especially get very proactive with that model and employing our sensor-enhanced aircraft. I always like to tell people, and you don't know this unless you I didn't know this, but if you're flying over a fire in a plane with your eyes, you can't see a fire. You can't even see a thermal hotspot. A lightning strike can happen and be a thermal hotspot the size of a shovel for 10 days, and then blow it up into a fire that takes out, you know, 8,000 homes and millions of acres. We've seen it happen 10 days later. The technology we have is, again, military grade. We can see that thermal hotspot the size of a shovel 9 miles away through smoke, and somebody can go with a Pulaski and put the fire out, you know, before it even becomes an issue. We did this in Montana, two weeks ago. We flew one lightning storm in a path after a lightning storm and detected eight lightning strikes, actually nine, and contained all of them. Working with the Montana officials, they themselves said: "You know, you potentially, you know, prevented millions of dollars worth of loss with that technology." We're flying night ops missions with that. So again, Bridger has the key to success there. We know that's where we're cornering the whole market in prevention, suppression, and so on. I don't know if there's anything you want to touch on here, John. Just kind of an overview of what we talked about. Yeah, I mean, from an ESG play, these wildfires produce a ton of carbon dioxide. We're getting in early to put out those fires. We're doing it with water, not with retardant. The retardant can have pollutant effects on the waterways, so we are limiting carbon dioxide into the environment. We're doing it with specific firefighting assets that are putting water on the fires. So those are all good things. This is the budget, the federal budget, and so what I'll really touch on here is a couple of minutes ago, Sam was talking about the severity of the fires, the millions of acres. You know, we've seen in California, where homes and lives have been destroyed on a much larger scale. This is really a bipartisan issue. There's very little opposition to increasing firefighting budgets in the United States, and we do see these increasing. We are capturing a portion, a very small portion of the suppression budget, but also we are seeing increase in the prevention and early detection, which is where our other assets are, smaller planes. So we see that as a growing area of federal program budgets, and we certainly see support from both sides of the aisle for growing budgets. Absolutely. I'm going to skip ahead to, this is a very technical slide, but shows some of our setup on our, what we consider proprietary setup for sensor-enhanced air attack. This is our newest platform, equipped with the WESCAM MX-15 camera system. And we'll go into it a little bit later, but the company we just acquired did, FMS Aerospace did the design and modification work for coming up with this, which then, you know, created the relationship that led to a merger with them. And here's some of the imagery that they're able to detect with a mix of those two camera systems you looked at with short, medium, and long-wave infrared EO/IR sensors, where we're able to do wildfire heat mapping, firefighter overwatch, detect hotspots, flood and disaster even, so multiple applications where we can work year-round, and we've used these in all of those capacities, really literally year-round, and that's only growing in demand. Gonna touch on real quickly here, our software application that just launched in the mobile app store, and this is designed by firefighters for firefighters. We acquired this company from a couple of guys, one of whom is a rappel guy who jumped out of helicopters and had an IT background and realized through incidents like the Yarnell Fire, which a movie was made about, where firefighters were left on the ground without situational awareness. You know, having grease pencils and paper maps doesn't provide firefighters what they need, given the technology available today. So he built this application, it's launched, and we're talking to incident management teams, local and state agencies, on deploying it. It does not exist on mobile phones for firefighters in the field, and they've created one where everybody can load the app, be a part of a team, and you have an incident commander who can push information, including PDF maps, lines and polygons, evacuation routes, and even without a connection, it can be point to point out in the field with one repeater touching one cell phone. The other thing that's important is you can glean information out from all sorts of real-time information, whether NOAA, what's called the InciWeb or every fire that's listed out there. And eventually, we have the capability to put our imagery right into the application from the air, so that they can have real-time fire perimeter mapping with our thermal sensors. We need to touch on the question. Okay. I'll- Just want to talk quickly about FMS. Yeah, let me skip along to FMS. We can take some questions. Yeah. John, if you want to touch on Spain real quick, and then- Yeah, so in Europe, we have four CL-215s that we have worked with a partner to... They've acquired, and we will be acquiring from them in May of 2025. These were end of life, and so we are returning to service, so we've torn off the skin and are overhauling the engines and going through all of the avionics and components of these machines, and we will plan to return them to service in 2025. The theater that we expect to deploy them in is Europe, but we are still working on the takeoff opportunities for those aircraft. That would bring our total water tank bomber fleet to 10 aircraft. So we're really excited about this. This is one of our growth in our core firefighting pillar. Sam's talked about the technology and software that we're providing, and then he'll quickly touch base on our most recent acquisition, FMS Aerospace. Yeah, and in the interest of time, I'll keep it short, but FMS, we just acquired FMS. Again, they helped us with the PC-12 aircraft you see up there, and it is our multi-mission aircraft, that's sensor enhanced. They do a lot of Department of Defense work, and really, I think we're one of two aerial firefighting customers they ever had before the acquisition. So, they're non-seasonal, year-round work, design, and modification, and the beauty of the merger there is that they have all the things that Bridger needs that we don't have, which is design, modification, flight testing. And we have all the things they need that they don't have, which is the facilities, the hangar space, the Part 145 repair station, the A&P mechanics. So together, we're gonna go after our synergy model is to go after bigger and better contracts that we wouldn't bid alone, and already we've got an entire pipeline built on the FMS Bridger combination of combined forces. So that's already been accretive and let alone the fact that, you know, John talking about our technology on our aircraft, we also have a pipeline of all the things we want to do with our existing profiles, including throwing a thermal sensor on our Scoopers, so that they can be more accurate when they drop water, 'cause a lot of times they're flying through smoke and the pilots are asking right now: "Can we get a thermal sensor so we know exactly where the flames are, and we can be more effective than anybody out in the field?" And that's a perfect project for the FMS team to take on over the off-season. It's about eight minutes left. Austin, do you wanna- Sure. Yeah. Actually, my first question, since you mentioned the thermal sensor on the Scoopers- Yep. Does that let them fly at night? No, not on the Scoopers. The contract restrictions for the Scoopers is daytime-only operations. Okay. Potentially, you could under a different contract model, but right now we do have some NIROPS with our other sensor enhanced air attack. Okay. Can you talk about the 2024 fire season year to date? I know 2023 was a little bit lighter, but, can you talk about this year and how the burn activity compares- Yeah to other recent years? Yeah. So this year seems to be a moderate to high level activity year. We got called out in February. There's a measurement that we use called preparedness level, and that's basically an indicator on a scale of one to five of how many assets are deployed on fire nationally. Right now, we're at a PL 5. We went there, I believe, on the 18th of July, and that's a good indicator. We hadn't hit that PL level since 2021. The number of acres burned is already over 5 million, and I think last year it never went above 3 million, I believe, or right around 3 million. So by indicators of what kind of a fire season we're having in the U.S., it seems to be a pretty busy one. Right now we're at, you know, just over $50 million in revenue as of, you know, yesterday, which is ahead of the pace of last year, and so performing really well in terms of where expectations- Yeah, we, we saw a dry winter across most of the Mountain West. We've had a few years with limited fire activity, so there's a ton of fuel in the forest, and we're seeing continued hot weather. I mean, the last week has been a break, but we've had 90+ degree weather for weeks across the Mountain West, which is drying out all of that fuel. So we expect it to be a relatively extreme season for 2024. Yep. A huge problem within the firefighting industry is the huge amount of unfulfilled requests for firefighting aircraft coming from the government agencies, both at the federal- Yep state, and local level. So what can Bridger and government agencies do to work together to reduce that high percentage of unfulfilled requests for air tanker sources? Yeah, that's a great question. So I think really it, it comes down to education and understanding the system, which we know better than anybody. It's called an IROC system, where these dispatches come through, and what we've learned from the Bridger side is educating the customer, which is the federal and state agencies, on how to use the system, where planes are available, how early in the year they're available, which is year-round. But one of the biggest, tactical approaches we're using is talking to the state agencies about how to get these planes on contract, and that's been really effective because you have states like Washington, Montana, Texas, that are super proactive in solving this problem themselves and making sure that they have the assets pre-positioned before they have to go through the federal system. and the beauty of it is, if they fly federal land, they get reimbursed for all the cost over fire. So, we're helping to drive that process and an education and one-on-one with the customer to build those contracts. I would add that dovetails with our strategy for contracting. These large IDIQ multiple awardee contracts, we were essentially call when needed, where with these states we're able to- Mm-hmm lock up exclusive use contracts. And so we're looking at our contracting mix, and we have in over the last couple of years, been actively working towards more exclusive use contracts so that we can drive the asset utilization and guarantee that we have a sort of minimum flight hours given, whether it's a extreme or moderate fire season, and understanding our fixed cost structure. That's been a big part of our strategy to move towards increasing EBITDA and free cash flow. Yep. Can you talk a little bit about Bridger's current cash needs and the estimated upgrade costs for the four Scoopers that you have in Spain? Yeah. You wanna cover that? Yeah. So we have a partnership with Marathon and Avenue, and they are funding the return to service. So the cash for the return to service for the Spanish aircraft will be paid through our partnership, and then we will buy those aircraft off of them. In terms of the cash needs for the company, we anticipate that the company will have positive free cash flow this year to, after, CapEx and debt, debt service. So that's something that we've been focusing on a lot, is reducing costs and ensuring a minimum level of revenue so that the company is able to produce free cash flow, and we anticipate that will, those improvements will continue into the future. Can you discuss the amount of flight hours that can be logged on the Super Scooper fleet and the reconnaissance aircraft fleet, and the maintenance and training period they undergo in the Q4 to Q1 period? Yeah, a great question. On the Scoopers, they have a timeout at 450 flight hours. We haven't quite come near that for a season. But we do stagger our aircraft so that the first two, 'cause they're in pairs, they, you know, every two run about the same hours. So the first two that come near any one of those marks, it's a great problem to have. We will pull those out of service, and by that time, typically, we're going into what we call the off-season, so that we could perform those heavy maintenance checks in the off-season and keep two or four available. On the reconnaissance side, the air surveillance side, those planes are passenger aircraft, so they don't require quite the maintenance intervals that these Scoopers do. But still kind of the same thing. We'll pull them for heavy, you know, borescopes on engines and things like that, if required, but we stagger those so that they're only down for a minimum amount of time, and obviously, when they're not in these exclusive use periods that John was talking about. Can you talk about your recent contract with the Department of the Interior? Yeah, for the multi-mission aircraft? Yeah. Yeah. So that was our biggest contract in terms of multi-year and guaranteed exclusive use dollars. And it was done with the help of FMS, so why we saw such a champion opportunity there. That's a five-year contract, and it's a minimum of 150 days per plane for two of our multi-mission aircraft, and those are national assets. So already one of them has been extended 200+ days. It was called out, I believe, in March or April of this year, and those planes have been working everything from wildfire to boundary mapping to other disaster surveillance applications. And again, federal assets, so the states are starting to become more educated and the demand for those is increasing. Really, if you think about the return on those aircraft from a percentage basis, and the penchant to use technology in, especially at the state level, that's where we see a big area of our growth going in the near future. Just last question here. How difficult is it to procure new and used Super Scoopers, given they're a specialty aircraft, and De Havilland Canada has a pretty full backlog? Yeah. Good, good question. We acquired six of the, we revitalized the program. Our founder reached out to Bombardier at the time, now De Havilland, and took, t hey had the type certificate in these older aircraft. He had them, the first six, refurbished and given to Bridger. There was four others at the time that were returned to this state and given to other countries, and that was it. Those were the only ones really available that could be returned to this, to this place. Now, De Havilland does have what's called the 515, which is a brand-new, off-the-line manufactured aircraft in the works. Because all of the countries that have used this model have old and aging aircraft that are timing out, and the piston version of this aircraft, they earmarked the first 20 of these to come off the line. So there's not a lot out there, and Spain was an example of the four that we scooped up. But the timeline to get the 515 back into play is, you know, gonna be several years, if, you know, five years or w e make estimates, but the demand is there for us, and we don't feel like there's gonna be any encroachment. Great! Well, we've come up to the end of our time.