On the Elmo 2 fire, once it burned it's way closer to Lake Mary Ronan and 150 homes there, they were able to make faster repetitions, turn around time was short. They flew one behind the other all day and dumped 600,000 gallons of water on the Fire.
At 1400 gallons at time, that was a lot of trips.
There was planes dropping chemical suppressant and a few helicopters with water buckets as well.
Last I read they had passed
$7M $10.4M in air support and had
575 616 men working this fire.