Did anyone see the 747 firebomber...

[bigr]

did anyone see the 747 evergreen firebomber test flight footage on NBC news yesterday. impressive as it lumbered along at low altitude dumping its load. they interviewed the test pilot. the gov't still isn't sold on the concept yet.

 

[wheelsup]

hehe. you said 'dumping its load'.

sorry couldn't resist.

~wheelsup

 

[DC4boy]

Big, expensive, ineffective

 

[captainv]

>Big, expensive, ineffective


yeah, but cool to watch...

http://www.evergreenaviation.com/supertanker/index.html

 

[Typhoon1244]

Great...another jet dumping chem-goo.

 

[Hugh Jorgan]

Uh-oh. Here we go again...

 

[bobbysamd]

747 Firebomber

did anyone see the 747 evergreen firebomber test flight footage on NBC news yesterday. impressive as it lumbered along at low altitude dumping its load. they interviewed the test pilot. the gov't still isn't sold on the concept yet.

I caught the last few seconds. Any links to the full version?

This was talked about before. I recall Avbug writing that a 747 slurry bomber was not practical for forest fire-fightering because it is not a practical low-altitude airplane and because of cost. Also, airports that have hosted fire bombers in the past might not be capable of accomodating 747s.

 

[bigr]

Also, airports that have hosted fire bombers in the past might not be capable of accomodating 747s.

true...but think about the range.

 

[Flyingtoohigh]

Range is great and all, but think about turn-around time. Those jet engines are very vunerable to FOD, too.

 

[avbug]

true...but think about the range.

Sure. With any luck, we can be dropping in China, any day. Or coolinging down dried up oasis in the the middle east. Range in a tanker is everything.

Then again, low level maneuverability (dropping high does no good), and the ability to work in severe turbulence on an extended basis (fires are wind driven, and working close to high mountainous terrain in a 40+ knot wind tends to rock your world, sometimes), to operate from short airfields (around the country only two or three air tanker bases have runways in the 12,000' range), to load quickly (how fast can you load 24,000 gallons of retardant, turn around, and takeoff in a 747?) and return to a fire, to vary the load (from coverage level 1...one gallon per hundred square feet, to the current maximum level desired for adequate forest protection in heavy fuels, coverage level 8), to respond to a single burning tree and extinguish it (without costing a hundred thousand dollars), all have merit, and all are applicable to single engine air tankers and the fleet of large air tankers that are still sitting idle waiting for some congressional common sense to correct the issue.

The 747 does have merit. But it's limited. For working a five mile line like we saw in California last year, it would have been a very useful tool. But it's no soloution...just another tool with limited use.

It's really not much newer than most of the large air tanker fleet, it's the farthest from any air tanker from performing a mission it was designed to perform (way, way outside it's design intentions), and will eventually experience the same cracked wings and failures that any other airplane will experience when placed in the fire environment. NASA determined many moons ago that an airplane in the fire environment experiences 1,000 times the stresses that it would in normal commercial service; another way of viewing this is to note that every hour over the fire is equal to a thousand hours of "normal" service. I've always reckoned it at five hundred, but NASA made the determination that it's a thousand. Either way, take a 200 series 747 with plenty of years of hauling whatever and stuff a tank system in it, and fly it into a forest fire. You're going to see happening to it what happened to Tanker 130 and Tanker 123, or to the 747 (last year?) over the South China sea.

We just lost the second single engine air tanker pilot this last week (found the wreckage last week; he disappeared the week before), and the season hasn't really become underway in earnest. As a basis for comparison, we've lost 4% of the carded and qualified pilots so far this year. We're going to see more air fatalities, and some ground fatalities, unless the boneheads that cancelled the large air tanker contracts put them back on line where they belong.