In aerial firefighting, aircraft are the visible part of the operation: Type 1 helicopters, air tankers, SEATs and lead planes that the operations centre watches most closely. But the operation does not run on aircraft alone. It also runs on fuel trucks, crew transport and supervisor pickups moving between helibases, dip sites and the line. For most agencies and operators, the two are tracked in different systems. The TracPlus integration with Geotab closes that gap.
***
Don't have time to read? Listen to this AI-narrated version of the blog:
A typical fire-aviation day involves dozens of moving parts that the people running it cannot all see at once. A helicopter coming off the line for fuel needs a truck on the pad. A supervisor vehicle moving between divisions needs to be in radio range, which means someone needs to know where it is.
When the aircraft are on one tracking platform and the ground fleet is on another, coordination happens through radio, phone and assumption. It works, mostly, but it carries a cost: radio chatter, aircraft holding for fuel that is closer than the dispatcher knows, support vehicles arriving after the aircraft has moved on, and after-action reviews reconstructed from two separate data sets.
Agency leaders and chief pilots have lived this pattern for years. The recent TracPlus and Geotab integration now offers a practical way to close it.
TracPlus is the operational data and intelligence platform used by a large share of the world's aerial firefighting agencies and contractors. Geotab is the telematics platform on a large share of the ground vehicles those same agencies and contractors run. The integration between them is straightforward: position data from your Geotab account flows into TracPlus on a continuous cycle, and each Geotab-tracked vehicle is shown as a TracPlus asset on the same map as the aircraft.
The integration is already running in the field for one of Australia's largest aerial firefighting operators, running a mixed fleet of helicopters and substantial ground support across multiple bases. The brief, in their words: see the trucks and the helicopters on the same map.
Setting up the integration is quick and requires no changes to how the ground fleet is currently managed in Geotab. The result is a single operational view in TracPlus, with Geotab continuing to do the work it was built for, including fleet maintenance, driver behaviour reporting and fuel reconciliation.
For aerial firefighting agencies and operators, the integration changes a few specific things on a fire-aviation day:
Every asset on one screen in real-time. Aircraft, fuel trucks, crew transport and supervisor vehicles in the same view, at the same time.
Coordination based on what is actually there. A visibility between the helicopter positions and fuel trucks so everyone can see the whole picture and coordinate accordingly. A Helibase Manager watching crew carriers relative to a Type 2 helicopter coming off the line can see both.
Unified replay and reporting. Post-incident and post-season reviews cover aircraft and ground movement in a single timeline. This is especially useful for agencies reporting to a board, or a state or federal legislature.
No new hardware. If your ground fleet is already on Geotab, the integration uses your existing account.
Over a fire season, the value compounds. The same map and timeline that coordinates a refuel today is the source of truth for the post-season review tomorrow, and for the resourcing conversation before next season begins. TracPlus already supports more than sixty tracking devices across Iridium satellite, cellular and ADS-B. Geotab is a different category: an integration with another platform, bringing ground-vehicle telematics into the same operational view. Whether the data comes from a device or another platform, the principle is consistent: apply the same standards regardless of source.
If your agency or company is running Geotab and TracPlus, or considering either, we are happy to walk through what the integration covers and what the setup looks like for your fleet and your operating model.
Contact your TracPlus account manager, or get in touch through the usual channels on tracplus.com.
***
Geotab is a trademark of Geotab Inc. TracPlus and Geotab are independent platforms. This article describes a TracPlus-built integration that consumes the Geotab SDK; it is not a joint product or a co-marketed offering unless explicitly stated.