No apologies necessary :-)
The resistance to even testing the Ilyushin waterbombers here in the US appears to be entirely political, as they are well-proven in many other countries. The IL-76 is not a new aircraft design by any means, and has been used as a waterbomber for decades. The U.S. Forest service, when pressed on this issue in times past, has claimed that the mountainous regions of many wildland areas in the US would be unsuitable for the planes but that's simply not true. They have been used extensively in mountainous regions in Russia and Greece. The USFS is blocking the use of these aircraft based upon reasons that they're not stating, because their stated reasons are obviously and demonstrably invalid. While the USFS plays politics, people's homes burn and lives are lost...there's simply no excuse for this profound negligence that they are perpetrating.
The USFS is blocking the use of these aircraft based upon reasons that they're not stating, because their stated reasons are obviously and demonstrably invalid. Weyerhaeuser gets more of their logs from outside the country than in the US, Canada, China, New Zealand... in part because of the way they whacked the Olympic Peninsula. For example, they manage over five million acres in the US, but 27,000,000 in Canada. They make more money in the US selling mortgages than they do logging forests. They don't want prices depressed by competition from the National Forests unless they can get the good stuff from virgin forest stands.
You may have observed that biomass plants can't get the chips to run even though there's enough excess fuel out there to provide for the domestic electrical needs of 140 million Americans. If you knew who funds the Natural Resources Defense Council, you'd understand why there's no thinning. There's money to be made preventing logging, and the people who fund the RICOnuts don't give a damn about the forest.
Yes, it's political. Most people don't have a clue how it really works.