One of the problems with fighting wild fires has been that the Forest Service's fleet of aerial tankers (once called "borate bombers") has traditionally been made up of old and tired airplanes. The Forst Service has been planning to replace them with old planes that are newer, but converted DC-10s are far more costly to operate.
The Forest Service has an opportunity: The Air Force is shelving its fleet of C-27Js. New C-27Js are being delivered straight to the Davis-Monthan AFB storage yard.
Seems to me that the Forest Service should snap them right up. They're brand new, they're turboprops and they were built for rough operation. They meet the speed and hauling requirements required by the Forest Service's specs for new tankers. They're available. And they're already paid for.
What's not to like?
The problem is that it makes too much sense, which is probably why those brand-new C-27s will sit in the boneyard while the Forest Service dicks around with converting old airliners with decades of service and thousands of flight hours on them, like old DC-10s and BAe-146s.
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3 comments:
I they take the new paid for planes where is the money for the contractors that have old used up planes to sell and convert for the right price?
Less important than the total hours for the '10s and BAEs, is the number of pressurization cycles. Those are likely to be fewer per airframe hours in the '10s as the BAEs were generally short haul transports.
Nevertheless, after having watched a few DC4 and CL215 fire fighting cycles on Ice Pilots, it strikes me that it's hard to imagine an aircraft less suited for the job than a DC-10. But what do I know?
LRod
ZJX, ORD, ZAU retired
The problem with the C-27 is that it's *small*. It's basically half a Herc. So while the Forest Service has accepted seven of the C-27's to replace older small planes, it still needs a big plane that can haul more than the C-27's payload. 20,000 pounds of water is only 2500 gallons of water, and while the flame retardant they use is likely lighter than water, it's not *that* much lighter. You can't put out much of a fire with that little water or flame retardant... thus the need for something *big*.
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