That means FAR less time flying to and from the fire, landing, loading, flying back etc. I’d lay odds that given there’s a rather large body of water close by, one of those little planes could put more water on the fire in 4 hours than that great bloody DC-10 could dream of."
Yes, exactly my point. That DC10 has to take off, fly to the fire some miles away, drop it's 12,000 gallons of water/retardant, fly back to the airport some miles away, land, taxi, refill, taxi, wait for clearance, take off and repeat.
The Bombardier 415, or Superscooper, just needs a body of water long enough to allow it to swoop in, refill in like 40 seconds, and climb back to altitude, it's a total touch and go, they hardly slow down. That's also why I said "fleet", you get 10 of these things in a row and you could dump massive amounts of water on a fire.
They are also built like a tank and are specifically engineered for firefighting, unlike a retrofitted civilian airliner. Hence the turboprop design. You won't see the wings of these things twist off like that C-130.
The plane has quite a history- it’s essentially an updated version of the piston-engined Canadair CL-215. The 215 was developed using lessons learned from converting the navy’s WWII Canso bombers to firefighting aircraft, the first serious effort at using aircraft to fight fires. The 415 is pretty much the gold standard for forest firefighting wherever there is a large body of fresh water nearby (IIRC they’re not designed to carry seawater).