SACRAMENTO — An Air National Guard crew lounges in the shadow of a hulking C-130, waiting for another call to attack another California wildfire with slurry.

It’s mostly quiet on this day, but not long ago this corner of McClellan Airfield was sending as many as 40 aircraft a day into the smoky skies to drop the gooey red slurry onto a smoldering landscape.

“This became one of the largest, if not the largest, air tanker operations ever,” said Mike Padilla, chief of aviation for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, or Cal Fire.

“It worked,” Padilla said. “It worked really well.”

More than 30 aircraft ranging from helicopters to C-130s to a DC-10 have flown slurry-bombing missions out of McClellan since the operation shifted here from a smaller airfield on June 28, Padilla said.

They have flown more than 400 sorties and dumped more than a million gallons of slurry on at least a dozen fires. Sometimes the smoke was so thick over McClellan that the aircraft had to take off and land by instruments.

The fleet came from the Air National Guard, the Air Force Reserves, the Marines, Cal Fire, the U.S. Forest Service, the federal Bureau of Land Management and local fire departments, Padilla said.

Military and civilian officials say the effort was nearly unprecedented in its size and in the degree of coordination required.

There was the task of getting the planes refueled, reloaded, back into the air and over their targets quickly.

But before that was the task of gathering the aircraft from different military units and getting them to work out of McClellan as a single unit. That job was made harder by differing chains of command, some mandated by federal law, said Navy Lt. Cmdr. Gary Ross, a spokesman for the U.S. Northern Command, which helped coordinate the military component of the McClellan operation.

Gen. Victor E. Renuart Jr., commander the Colorado-based Northern Command, visited the flight line on Wednesday and liked what he saw.

“It was a real good effort,” he said, and should be a blueprint for future operations.

Eight C-130s converged on McClellan after the National Interagency Firefighting Center asked the Northern Command for help. The planes came from an Air Force Reserve unit in Colorado and from Air National Guard units in North Carolina and Wyoming.

A system of pressurized tanks and tubes was loaded into the cargo bay of each C-130. Called a Modular Airborne Firefighting System, or MAAF, it can unload up to 3,000 gallons of fire-retardant slurry in seconds.

A MAAF-equipped C-130 loaded with slurry and fuel can weigh 145,000 pounds at takeoff, near the plane’s 155,000-pound maximum. Once over the fire, the tanker crew follows a lead plane to the target, sometimes over difficult terrain.

“It’s real challenging. It gets the heart pumping,” said Lt. Col. Mike Barkdull of the Wyoming Air National Guard, who flew C-130s out of McClellan and then was put in charge of the operation.

But he prefers that to “just sitting out in this heat,” waiting to be called to a fire, he said.

“We like performing what we were trained to do.”