Abstract Air entrainment, leading to strong fire whirls, is commonly thought to be caused by the buoyant rise of the hot combustion products under the influence of gravity. We have, however, created in the laboratory steady, axisymmetric strong fire whirls with axes inclined 30° from the vertical orientation, whirls which model an inclined fire whirl, about 30 m tall, observed in California wildland near the Cleveland National Forest. The results contradict the common notion of buoyancy being significant for the structure of the whirl, implying that strong fire whirls instead are dominated by rotation only, even if their axis is vertical. The new concept of rotation-controlled fire whirls is explained by a Rossby number displacing the Froude number (or the Richardson number) in describing the phenomenon.