[Poohbah]

A Seahawk (Navy Blackhawk) is not exactly a Hughes 1000 Little Bird!

No, but it ain't a Super Stallion, either!

And Navy Seahawk pilots who land on pitching destroyers in high winds at night are not exactly "Bob from Channel 8, your traffic eye in the sky" when it comes to flying hairy missions.

True, but their missions require specialized training; so does firefighting, and the skill sets do not have perfect overlap. The problem is that you can't just get up on the spur of the moment and do something like this--you need to have trained prior to the crisis.

[Travis McGee]

Sometimes you do what you gotta do. Putting a sling load on the deck of a pitching destroyer is MUCH harder than dropping a load of water from 200 feet over a fire.

At the VERY least, I want this topic explored, so the NEXT time, we don't wait 24 hours to get air assets over the fires!

We need to look at these fires the way medics look at the "Golden Hour" in treating trauma. A few dozen helicopter buckets of water in the FIRST HOURS of a fire like this could have stopped it cold, before the Santa Anas blew it into the "Firestorm of 2003."

"WHY ARE 100 NAVY SEAHAWKS SITTING IDLE, 10 MINUTES FROM THE FIRESTORM???????"