Russian airplane fights wildfires in Serbia for three days

MOSCOW. July 28 (Interfax) - A Russian firefighting airplane finished a three-day deployment to Serbia to fight forest fires and left for Moscow on Saturday while another Russian firefighting plane is preparing to leave for Montenegro on Sunday, Russia's Emergency Situations Ministry said.

The ministry's Ilyushin Il-76TD has carried out 19 flights in the vicinity of the Serbian city of Nis, spending a total of 12 hours and 20 minutes in the air and dropping 798 tonnes of water, ministry spokesman Viktor Beltsov told Interfax.

A California company had an interesting idea in wildfire fighting: a firefighting blimp.

Not as bizarre as it sounds, for several reasons. First of all, blimps can carry a LOT of water compared to aircraft and helicopters.

They also have the ability to stay high above the column of hot air from the fire and not just dump all their water at once, but to put the equivalent of a sustained, heavy rain on the fire, or around the fire, for as long as an hour. It would also be very useful in wetting residential areas in the path of fires, to protect homes and businesses.

Then, if there are any lakes or ponds nearby, they can very rapidly refill their tank, far faster than a typical aircraft. Just land on the water, let the tanks flood, then take off again.

The great difference in loaded and unloaded weight is handled by compressors, so that when unloading, extra gas is put into tanks. When loading the tanks are emptied into the blimp for the increased lift.

If you compare speeds with the Goodyear blimp, in still wind it cruises at 35mph, with top speed a little over 50mph.

One obvious thing that hasn’t been considered is the use of a blimp to disperse fire fighting foam. High expansion foam has been used to fight wildfires with great success for years. A single 55 gallon drum of dry foam powder added to the water in its tank could expand 200 times to 11,000 gallons of foam spraying out of the tank like a giant can of whipping cream.

Finally, such a blimp could work well with other aircraft that could handle hot spots with typical water dumps. And once the fire was mostly under control, the blimp could continue to rain on embers to prevent the remains of the fire from spreading.

SERBIA (RIA Novosti).- The fire that was declared in the mountain area close to the City of Svrljig, East of Serbia, it is located and controlled informed the agency of Tanyug. The Russian plane IL-76 has made a substantial contribution extinguishing the fire in the early part of last Thursday. It accomplished four flights in this area affected by the flames. When the flames were controlled, the authorities canceled the decision to evacuate the surrounding towns. Belgrade asked Moscow to help extinguish the forest fires and in response the Russian authorities sent a plane to fight the fires.

What a great opportunity the US had/still has to build better ties with the Russian Federation and solve a bit of a thorny disaster response problem at the same time.

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