Hi, I’m Paul Darley and thanks for tuning into our May and June issue of Inside Darley.
Darley at our heart is truly a relationship company, and because of that trade shows play a really important part of our marketing mix. If you can imagine, we’re going to exhibit at over 100 defense and fire trade shows in 2026 alone.
We’re right in the heart of it right now. In fact, recently we attended and exhibited at the AUSA Global Force Symposium down in Huntsville, AL. Last week we were at the Navy Sea Air Space show in Washington, DC, and this week we have Modern Day Marine also in Washington, DC. We’ve got Interschutz taking place June 1-5th in Hannover, Germany. That show takes place every five years, and they estimate 150,000 attendees at that, if you can imagine. And June 4th here in Illinois, we’re going to host our 20th annual Illinois Fire Service Home Day. We’ve attached some information for you on that, so hopefully you can attend.
For those in the fire service, of course, our largest and best trade show is the FDIC. That’s the Fire Department Instructors Conference, which just took place last week down in Indianapolis. It was so great to see so many of you, our customers, our partners, our friends, and you know, the dealers and all the rest. Our booth was abuzz the entire three days of the show. And really, with all of the new products that we introduced there, from wildland products to new drones to new VR, our new Darley Data Center got a lot of attention. It’s now AI enabled, which is really cool.
There’s a lot of talk in the fire service these days about wildland and wildland urban interface, which is WUI. We’ve attached for you here our new Darley Wildland brochure. We’ve also attached for you a recent report put out by the World Economic Forum. They put it together with PwC, and it’s called From Wildland Risk to Resilience, so some really interesting news there.
On the drone front, It’s our fastest growing part of our business, both drones and counter drones, both in fire and defense. And we’ve attached for you here our new drone defense brochure, which was really well received at the show, along with the number of drones that we exhibited.
There’s a lot of talk in the fire service these days coming out of Washington, DC, about the number, the lead time, and price of fire apparatus. And you know, the Center for Public Excellence, put out for the Fire Department Leadership Perspective, recently released a new report on their apparatus capital purchasing. We’ve attached that report for you here. Roughly 1,000 attendees, and it’s interesting, over two-thirds of them plan to purchase a new fire apparatus over the next year. 78% of them feel it’s very important that they purchase their fire apparatus from the same brand, which is interesting. 65% percent of them are going to take a delivery of a new truck over the next year. So very high response rate there.
FAMA, I can assure you, the Fire Apparatus Manufacturers Association and all of our members want to do nothing more than be able to increase our production of fire apparatus and related components. And you know, just after COVID, primarily due to federal and state stimulus, the number of fire apparatus being purchased increased 45%, and no manufacturer was able to ramp up that quickly to meet those needs, but I can assure you all of the major fire apparatus manufacturers have invested heavily in new plants and equipment in order to meet the increased demand in the fire service. And that’s even despite the last couple of years, new orders for fire apparatus being down five and ten percent respectively. So interesting trends taking place. And we’ve attached this FAMA of report that was just recently released. It gives you some good data on that.
Lastly, every year we run a thought leadership essay contest, and this will be our fifth year. Again, we’re doing it together with the NFFF, that’s the National Fallen Firefighters Foundation, and this year’s essay is titled How Artificial Intelligence Can be Used to Improve Firefighter Health and Safety. Those applications or those essays are due June 15th. We’ve got $6,000 in prize money for that, and no using AI on your essay.
So hey, thanks for tuning into this issue of Inside Darley. If there’s anything we can be doing to assist you, we hope you reach out to us.
20th Annual Illinois Fire Service Home Day Flyer
Darley Wildfire & WUI Response Capabilities Brochure
World Economic Forum & PwC – From Wildfire Risk to Resilience
Darley Uncrewed Systems Capabilities Brochure
Fire Apparatus Manufacturers’ Association – North America Fire Apparatus Trend Report
