If you want on or off my aerospace ping list, please contact me by Freep mail.
Posted on 06/03/2006 10:53:21 AM PDT by Fractal Trader
Coming soon to a wildfire near you: The next generation in airborne fire fighting. It is a converted 747-200. Instead of carrying passengers, the retired airliner has been outfitted with huge tanks capable of carrying 20,500 gallons of fire retardant roughly 7 times the amount carried by the largest air tankers in the current, aging fleet.
Evergreen International of Oregon showed off its "supertanker" Tuesday in Boise. Its spent $40,000,000 converting the 747 and is now campaigning to get the Federal land management agencies to add it to their fire fighting arsenal. The Federal government is working out the details of a short term this summer only contract for Evergreen. That will allow fire bosses to put the supertanker to the test. Can it fly low and slow enough to be effective against fires burning in canyons and on mountainsides? Can it operate out of remote airports that are often used to stage air tanker operations? Can it do all while not breaking the budget?
These are just some of the questions they hope to answer during the test period. The company contends that if the supertanker had been in service in 2002, it could have saved $108,000,000 fighting seven major fires that destroyed 1.4 million acres.
(Excerpt) Read more at abc4.com ...
Aerospace ping!
Probably too big and fast to be of any real use.
Is that cool or is that cool!
Yeah. low and slow in a 747 is not my idea of fun.
General Buck Tergis (Dr Strangelove movie)"I love to watch those babies when they come in low......."
Won't work in our narrow forested canyons. Could be good on open prairies.
That about give me an Aviowoody!
Didn't the Russkies have a ready-to-go supertanker a few years back? Their really big bird, that was capable of carrying even more water than this 747, with proven experience fighting fires in Europe.
But the National Forest Service kept it out of the US because the current contract holders for fire fighting tanker services did not want the competition. And Umpteen-Diddly Millions of acres were lost.
Frankly, the Russian design sounded more suitable, because it was based on a military transport aircraft that is designed to operate out of rough and short fields and for low speed parachute deployment operations.
If you want on or off my aerospace ping list, please contact me by Freep mail.
They should use it to spray soap and perfume on hippie protesters.
Yes, it was a modified IL-76.
And lice medicine.
With the aging and deminished fleet; it's cetainly worth a try. I say go for it.
Richard
Ignorance is bliss.
Erickson Air-Crane S-64E. One can drop up to 30,000 gallons per hour. Multiply that by three or four and you're talking about some serious fire fighting capacity.
That's General "Buck" Turgidson
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0057012/
(just had to double-check my feeble memory)
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