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Using a 747 to Fight Wildfires
RotJ writes "It's fire season again. And the government just grounded 33 aging air tankers on Monday due to safety issues. Looking for a modern solution, Evergreen Aviation has come up with a 747 supertanker with 24,000 gallons of tank space onboard, which allows it to cover seven times the area of today's largest existing airtanker. In addition to fighting fires, it will be able to contain oil spills and 'perform challenging homeland security missions' like neutralizing chemical or biological attacks. And think of how many John Goodmans you could cover with fire retardant. Be sure to watch the videos."
Be sure to melt down their server. Each video is around 90MB large ;-)
How much can you slow down a 747.... would it no make it hard to hit the target at 600mph
Cruise TT
Somehow I can't envisage this with a 747, and how many 747 sized airstrips do you find near forestry areas?
And if you thought that was boring you obviously havn't read my Journal ;-)
How will it protect us from a biological attack? By drowning us in more harmful anti-bodies instead?
do you need to go if you want to water a forest, which is not large compared to the flight range of a 747?
Then again, in a flight simulator I've flown the 747 straight up so you could approach the burn and then climb hard while dropping the water.
What effect does this kind of dump do to the aerodynamics?
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
Why hasn't this been done before? I know that fire-prone countries like Australia would greatly benefit from such a thing.
OLPC Australia
This "11,000-gallon tanker plane pours 'too much water,'". I guess 24,000 gallons (90000L) is not too much though...
After watching a programme last night on a (mockup) terrorist attack on london (about 2000 people died when a chlorine tanker was blown up) i want one of these for stopping chemical attacks! apparently we have 1 air-ambulance for the whole city and a fraction of the police have chemical/biological training and equipment and the tube staff have nothing except some training that said "get everyone out of the nearest exit as fast as you can" wow i think i might become an emergency training consultant, i could make millions!
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that be John Travolt's 747 that he will be flying over to battle forest fires? ;)
They have been grounded for a reason. They are knackered.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
"The faucet is pouring too much water."
/$2,000,000 investigation.
"Turn it down."
"Oh."
The 747 with a gross weight of the 747 of roughly 800,000 pounds is more than that of almost any other aircraft built. The 747 can carry a maximum payload of approximately 144,000 pounds for a distance of 6854 miles and has a cost-economical cruising speed of 564 miles per hour. That's a lot of water in with a short flight time (even if local). And for an airplane that's been around since the 1960's -- not bad either.
> and the tube staff have nothing except some
....
> training that said "get everyone out of the
> nearest exit as fast as you can"
sure, the plane would come in handy, here
America West Pilot 1: So this weekend gig of dumping water on forest fires sure is sweet...
America West Pilot 2: Water? I filled this bad bitch up with smirnoff and set course for vegas!
Didn't early brochures for the 747 show a small swimming pool in first class?
One of the latest Popular Science articles talked about a new(?) type of plane which is a combination of a helicopter and a jet (so it has rotors and jet engines), so it can take off almost anywhere, but get up to almost mach 1 if I remember correctly. The hauling capacity is enormous, one of the scenarios they showed was for fire fighting. Unfortunately, I was unable to remember the url of the manufacture, or find the article on popsci.com, I am sure someone else here knows the model name.
Cost - even the smaller water bomber's are expensive. Operating cost of a 747 would be even higher again.
Accessability - a 747 doesn't operate from small dirt airfields or remote areas. I can see one of these trying to fly from a larger area to a remote area to drop water. (See costs)
Speed - they'd be running a lot faster than most water bombers. I can here the STALL STALL warnings now.
Accuracy - See Speed.
They might be good for fast burning "California or OZ" fires but I not sure they would be much use for most medium size forest fires. IMHO
how much is this thing going to cost? I mean anyone can design (well almost anyone) a TOP500 (albeit probably not a very cost/resource effective one) computer but not many can fork up the money to support its production...
What's another word for Thesaurus?
-Steve Wright
Interesting is that it covers "7 times" of what a normal air tank covers. As amateur I would assume that it takes similar time to cover the burning area, it just takes makes re-fitting faster. It is probably harder to fly as whell.
Beside that the chemical and biological "homeland" security aspect is ridiculous. You dont have such planes equipped in time fight such attacks.
There is old testimony relating CIA / Pacificorp with selling off Aircraft to the private sector to combat firefighting. Wonder if this is a cleanup operation to retire the "suspicious" planes
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/pandora/f
And here's the thing, once a fire gets to the size that you start thinking about dropping 24,000 gallons of water on it, YOU'VE ALREADY LOST! Water sure as hell ain't stopping it, unless it happens to be in the form of a severe rainstorm, and even then fires can burn underground for months. There were fires in Yellowstone that started in late fall, got snowed on, smolderd the entire winter underground and then reemerged the next spring.
What the Forest Service needs to do, and to their credit seem to at least be aware of on the ground (at least from my personal experience), is have quick response helicopters that can get to fires before they have blown up (read, still under 100 acres, give or take). Once a fire gets much bigger than say 1000 acres, it starts to create its own weather - at this point, the effort becomes more one of 'figure out where the wind will push the fire and get the hell out of the way!'
The only possible use I see for this plane, and one in which it is probably well-suited for, is in protecting man made structures from large, fast moving fires. Let's say there was a fire bearing down on Denver and threatening a rather pricey subdivision. This plane would be perfect for that job - they could load it up with fire retardant and create a huge 'wet line' in front of the subdivision. Maybe make a couple drops and you would be golden. My guess is that's what they have in mind, but I could be wrong.
One thing the Russians are good at is making things tough. Their design philosophy on military aircraft (including their fighters) is to make them robust to hostile environments including unimproved runways etc. On the surface this looks like a far more economical model using either the Russian or Canadian equipment than to retrofit some used up aircraft not designed for anything like this mission.
When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.
The aircraft would be gutted of any items not needed for this job to bring the weight down. Don't expect to see first class seating and in flight internet access. The amount of water would simply be kept below 910,000 lbs (747's maximum takeoff weight) minus the empty (no water) tanker weight. It looks like they chose 24,000 lbs of water for this configuration. One thing that I would be concerned about is sloshing of water that would throw the aircraft off balance. A solution to this would be many seperate water tanks that would minimize this effect. On thing that I couldn't find on the site is if they are using a commercial 747 or a cargo 747.
Jeff, you moron ! That was not the water release button !! That was the emergency fuel dump button !
-
Roses are #FF0000, Violets are #0000FF, find / -name '*base*' |xargs chown -R us && mv zig greatjustice
pissing boy scouts with rubber "shovely looking put-y outers" can't save the day either?
Poor show!
Hi Tom. I'm going to go out on a limb here, and guess that the 747 won't be completely full of water. I know what you're thinking -- that's crazy talk! But I have this funny feeling that just won't go away: maybe the people who think of this stuff have better things to do than make up stupid shit that doesn't work.
I'm just guessing, of course. It's quite possible that the plan involves filling a 747 up with water and watch it sit on the tarmac. That could also be fun.
Bombardier CL415
Check the description and FAQ here.
Retrofitting a 747 for firefighting? Why not buy a plane designed from the ground off for firefighting purposes? It can drop 32000 to 65000 gallons of water between refueling. In real life situation it has proven to be able to deliver up to 30 000 gallons per hour.
Ever since I was a kid I'd seen videos of CL215 (the predecessor) fighting the big forest fires, and I was always wondering why the US used small choppers carrying minuscule payloads of water to fight the fires. Can anyone clear this up?
All tanker delivery systems in use today, except the MAFFs systems (modular airborne firefighting system; military) are capable of multiple drops, split loads, and variable coverage level on every drop. It's part of the basic requirement to field a tank system for use over the fire.
The Evergreen project is being tested at Marana (AZ) now through the middle of next month.
I believe it holds a certain amount of promise, but also some challenges. Like every asset over the fire, it has advantages and drawbacks.
The delivery system is reported to use water injection ahead of the retardant stream to break up the airflow; a fairly complex and weighty soloution to an otherwise simple problem.
The aircraft is swept wing, which presents certain difficulties at low speeds in the fire environment. The concept is of a tanker that makes high retardant or water drops, rather than using it for directly fighting fire. The aircraft will be very limited in the fields from which it can operate, restricting it from being useable at most tanker bases. It also means the airplane will have to make longer ferry's to get to fires, which will give it longer turn around times, greater costs, and may negate any advantages to carrying a greater retardant payload.
Large burning objects fly around over a fire, including trees or parts of trees. A turbofan engine is subject fo FOD contamination by smoke on the compressor blades, but also to direct strike damage from objects over the fire. It is also subject to flame-out, a greater liklihood than a piston engine that has continuous ignition
Drops are typically best done slow; the faster the tanker is moving, the higher the drop needs to be in order to allow the retardant to stop it's forward motion and fall straight down. Retardant moving forward on contact with the fuels only coats one side, an effect known as 'shadowing.' This leaves one side of the fuel unprotected, and negates the value of dropping the retardant.
A fast tanker may need to drop so high that the benifits of the retardant drop are muted. The higher the drop, the greater the drift isue, meaning reduced accuracy, and consequently reduced usefulness.
A DC-4 can be supported by the flight crew; often mechanics who can work on the aircraft as well as fly it. Often a single additional mechanic is a luxury, or all that is necessary to keep the airplane flying. Not the case with a B747.
Maneuverability close to the fire, in terrain with severe or extreme turbulence and reduced visibility may present a number of unique problems for the B747.
If it's viable, the B747 concept (and the DC-10 being fielded by Omni) will present a useful and valueable tool over the fire. It's just one tool, however, and not a soloution of a panacea for other problems plaguing the industry right now. Each aircraft over the fire, heavy fixed wing, single engine fixed wing, light helicopters, heavy helicopters, lead aircraft, air attacks, jump ships, etc, all have important roles. No one aircraft can or should perform them all. Additional available resources such as a B747 only mean that additional tools are available from which to choose when deciding how to most effectively fight a fire.
I fully support any developmental effort to enhance the industry. I tend to take a wait-and-see attitude; these aircraft were never intended to enter or operate in an environment such as the fire ground. Only time will tell what the success of these projects will be.
Back in the 80's, I worked 3 summers as a Smokejumper for the BLM out of Fairbanks, Alaska, and was detailed to the lower 48 on 2 occasions. Smokejumpers and air tanker are considered initial attack resources, so, getting to the fire while it was small and containable was the primary mission. Personally, I find that the aging A-10 aircraft would be more practical than the 747, as it can be forward positioned to the existing air tanker support facilities (Minden, NV being nearest to my neck of the woods/desert), and is fast and exceptionally maneuverable, a requirement for the mountainous terrain of much of the west.
I travel on the tube daily and know a couple of people who work at one of the busier stations. Anyone knows it's desperately easy for a suicide bomber to blow up a tube train. Carry a rucksack packed with the necessary equipment and off you go.
--
This sig is inoffensive.
1. The NIH, Not Invented Here-syndrome and
2. Money.
Am I the only one that can see a clear conflict of interest situation in this case? The same guy in both a "criteria role" and as representative for contractors (both private and federal)...
Ten bucks that The Forest Service will abandon it's "too much water" policy when a US-company comes up with a US-built plane doing the exact same thing as these Ilyushins. And that despite the advantages of the Ilyushins like better maneuverability, reduced cost and shorter takeoff.
Melius mori in libertate quam vivere in servitute.
AVWeb ran an article about "heavy airtankers" - used ex-Airforce/Navy C-130 and P-3s pressed into service as tankers. From this, we get a weight of 9.3lb/gallon for retardant, for those interested. For our 747, this would be 223,200lb, or 111.6 tons. The most interesting part of this paper is where they talk about the fatigue resulting from the rapid unloading of the aircraft. Apparently, this is the main cause of catastrophic wing failure. When you suddenly change the aircraft load by 15-20%, you get a definite bending action in the wings. Just like bending a paperclip, eventually this leads to failure.
The paper also briefly mentions the super-tanker idea (747 or DC10 based).
The other big concern is that the economic payback for larger aircraft is longer than for smaller aircraft. They were talking about the proposition being questionable with an $8 million acquistion cost. I don't think you could get an operation 747 for anything close to that...
I've heard of proposals like this before. For a while there, the FUSSR was trying to get interest up in Western countries to buy/lease IL-76's for similar duty. FUSSR aircraft might make more sense, they are notoriously inexpensive.
Let's use stealth bombers instead to drop water.
What happened in that 2002 crash was, one of the wings of the plane just sheared off in flight as it came out of a turn. It was structural fatigue, as this article says. The plane involved was just under 60 years old, IIRC.
The pilots got profiled in the papers. Impressive people. Most pilots are flying for the love of it, they get paid next-to-nothing even for the airlines until they have tons of seniority, but these guys were what you'd call heroic characters.
They're truly old planes; it was like seeing a B-24 Liberator at an airshow, only instead of being carefully eased along in their dotage they were still hauling massive loads of water at low altitudes and speed, flying risky in the mountains in this case, for decades after the war. Pretty hard use.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
http://www.dropzone.com/news/Skydiverinnearmisswit hsl.shtml
1) Take all the people, luggage, and seats out of the plane.
2) Replace with an equal weight of water
3)...
4) Profit!
Seriously, you make it sound as if it's nearly impossible for hte plane to take off on it's own.
Several points here:
Old 747s sitting up for sale or scrap at Mojave and other boneyards can be had for $1-2 million and be made flyable to the conversion facility for maybe $25K (including fuel anywhere in the USA).
Main problems are already mentioned:
- quick unloading causing stress.
- high speed of the aircraft compared to the ideal drop speed.
- poor lowlevel agility
- greater possibility of damage to the engines
- more expensive maintenance
- longer runways needed
Soviet aircraft may sound an interesting alternative but they are not.
They may be cheaper as an initial purchase, but maintenance costs are far higher and reliability is lower (hours of maintenance per flight hour is higher, far higher).
Just as much as you would need a large fast plane that frops a huge amount of water you also need planes that can pick up water locally and fly VERY slowly.
My biggest concern with this system is turn around time.
I always thought the B-36 would've made a great supertanker. It was a post World-War-2 Strategic Air Command bomber and it was truly huge. It was built to carry the first crop of hydrogen bombs. Alas, most of the B-36's have been scrapped and melted down long ago. Like many aircraft of the World War 2 and Cold War era, only a few survive.
Would the reduced oxygen from smoke filled air have a detrimental effect on the efficiency of the air intake / mixing in the jet engine? If the 747 would swoop down low to deliver its payload through a very thick wall of smoke, the jet engine intakes would undoubtedly have a very reduced amount of oxygen to mix with fuel to combust... This would put the heavily loaded 747 at risk, especially if it were fully loaded.
Just my two cents...
Why did I lurk so long before registering for a Slashdot account? I could have had a Slashdot ID of less than 100000.
Go back and read the article and get a little bit more context. Too much water at an incorrect angle.
During a fire a few years back, the pilots were using are road as ref. point for heading back to the fire after scooping up a new load of water. These things were passing over our house not more then 100 ft from the top of our roof. With a full load of water then engines make one hell of a noise.
Vancouver Island is home to two other interesting fire fighting planes: The Mars Water Bombers.
The Mars planes fight fires in the US all the time since they are privetly owned.
I read a book once written by an ex-Hot Shot smoke jumper. He commented that they used to joke that to fight a wildfire, you throw money at it until the rains come. This sounds like a perfect example.
Besides all the discussions about flying a 747 at very low speed and about the manouvrability at low altitude, what happens to the plane when in a few seconds it becomes 100 tons lighter? Don't know the ratio between the empty and full weight of the plane, but loosing weight that fast doesn't seem to be a situation when I would like to be a pilot. And definitely not one when you are low speed, low altitude.
Browsers shouldn't have a back button!! It's all about going forward...
It really wouldn't surprise me if that was their plan :-P
Why does it seem like I'm the only one getting a taxidermy site when I click the link for Evergreen Aviation?
... an entire flock of radio controlled, stuffed birds converted to "tanker" use, able to carry 1 cup of water in a single drop.
Maybe they've gone to the other end of the spectrum
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
Martin Mars is the world's current best, AFAIK. May not have the single-drop capacity of the 747 design, but can refill every 15 minutes by scooping water from a lake while in flight. That equates to a helluva lot more overall capacity.
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
It's the turbulence that causes fatigue, not the action of unloading a lot of water at once. If you think about it, when you go flying in an airliner and you hit a bumpy patch of air, it's usually around clouds. The reason clouds usually form is that air (moist air) is rising, and carrying the water vapor up to a height where the temperature drops enough for the water to condense. The point is, the air is RISING. As the plane flies thru this rising air, the direction the wing is encountering the airflow suddenly changes slightly. Not a lot, but enough that the lift on the wings suddenly increases. The lift (the force that holds the plane up) is a function of angle of the airflow to the wing, as well as airspeed squared. So when you increase the angle of airflow, the lift increases. Now you have more lift than weight, so the plane bumps upwards. But the area of rising air is relatively small, so you get a short transient bump.
Over a fire, you've got LOTS of bumpy air - the fire is superheating patches of air, and it's all bumpy and roiling around. All that mess is rising rapidly into the sky, and fresh cold air is rushing in around the edges (remember Backdraft, the movie?), moving downward.
To be an effective air drop platform, you need to fly very low, so that the water doesn't disperse too much before it hits the target zone. So you're deliberately flying an airplane thru extremely unstable (rapidly rising and falling) patches of air, with very large vertical speeds (which means, larger changes in airflow direction, which means more severe turbulence).
As any materials engineer knows, and as most of us geeks know, if you bend something often enough, it breaks. And the further you bend it each time, the faster it breaks. An airplane wing is designed for a certain "fatigue life" - a certain number of cycles of bending. With the above primer on turbulence, you can imagine how drastically different from the design you will be using the airplane when you fly it 500 ft over a forest fire, compared to relatively smooth air at 38,000 ft.
So watch the amazing video from last year of a C130 losing its wings over a fire - it's a natural but hopefully rare consequence of abusing an airplane this way. The way the airplane owner SHOULD handle this is frequent and intensive inspections. That C130, as I recall, was NOT properly inspected and was well past its service life. You can read the NTSB report on that accident at http://www.ntsb.gov/Recs/letters/2004/A04_29_33.pd f (PDF file). A particularly telling quote: "The rate that maneuver load factors between 2.0 and 2.4 were experienced by firefighting aircraft was almost 1,000 times that for aircraft flown as commercial transports." (Load factor is engineer-speak for "g-force" - 1g is normal gravity; most transports never exceed 1.4g except in severe turbulence.)
--Brandon / Split Infinity Music
Sloshing would not be a problem. First, you use multiple tanks, and keep them FULL. When you drop, you drop an entire tank, not a half tank. If they needed to configure the tanks for multiple drops from a single tank, you just add baffles to eliminate the sloshing. Similar to what you do to a race car to keep fuel and oil from getting pulled to one side when cornering at speed. Since the air force seems to have been able to create air to air tankers, and these don't fall from the sky from sloshing, one would think they could do the same for the water.
Evergreen is a CIA front. Originally was intermountain and part of the CIA's Air America. Thats one reason you see the terrorism angle .. its for the benefit of the CIA which funds its core operation.
Evergreen owns a significant amount of ex-Air America property and provides guerilla drop operations to south america and other places.
Evergreen is basically a commercial cover for the CIA.
I couldn't agree with you more, however, the US seems to suffer from a major case of Not Invented Here Syndrome. At one point in time, the Alaskan legislature appropriated funds to purchase two Canadair fire bombers, and the state's top fire fighting official wouldn't let the purchase go through, claiming they would do no good in Alaska. Some progress is being made, Hawkins and Powers, one of the major contractors is in negotiations to buy several of the Russian Be-200's. The problem is, the US Forest Service has stated they won't contract Be-200's because they don't have a US Type Certificate. Oh, BTW, I'm from Minnesota, one of the two states that has realized the value of a purpose-built fire bomber(North Carolina being the other has a single Canadair CL-215), we have 2 Canadair CL-215's protecting our property and forests.
If you're going strictly for size, then yes, the A380 would be better than a 744. But, the A380 isn't going to be delivered until 2006 at the earliest. It's impossible to know whether their ambitious specs will live up to the promise; besides, early planes in a generation tend to underperform as the manufacturer works out the kinks in the production line.
wouldnt it be easyer to just nuke the forest?
a couple of those daisy bombs on strategic places
seems a lot cheaper, and since the animals and trees are dead already...
that large handle at the slow speed and low altitude required for a precision drop? 747 was not built to "crop dust".
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
Forest fires typically occur in mountains. Mountains are usually between 1,000 feet and 13,000 feet tall (300 - 4000 meters). Forest fires usually occur in the summertime. Forest fires make a lot of hot, dry air. The net result of this is a substantial increase in the density altitude in the region around a forest fire.
The density altitude is the altitude the airplane "sees" - taking into account air density, temperature, humidity, etc. Above a 5,000ft density altitude (~1,500m), most airplanes have a hard time just taking off with a full fuel load, much less performing high-g maneuvers close to the ground. At Las Cruces, New Mexico, the airport here is at about 4,500ft (1,370m) mean airfield elevation. Density altitudes above 7,000 feet (2,130m) are not uncommon - even early in the morning.
To operate under these conditions, pilots simply reduce their passenger and fuel loads. I haven't done the math, but I suspect that to make a 747 light enough to operate safely "down low" at a high density altitude, it wouldn't be able to carry much more water than the C-130 tankers we already use. Plus, a loaded 747 would tend to perform like an elephant on ice skates - a consequence of its swept wing and turbine engines - which don't "spool up" as fast as props. There would be zero margin for error.
This sig is a test. If this had been an actual sig, you would be reading something quite a bit wittier than this now.
That aside, the whole point of it covering 7 times the area is that you can do it in one pass instead of 7. Show up, dump your load, and leave. I suspect that they will be used only for the largest fires, as the cost of operating a 747 is tremendous. If you had three or four of these things in the country you could direct them to where they were most needed. If you have a fire on the west coast you might be able to have one on scene in an hour, another on scene in two and a half, another there in four, and another in six. They can make passes over large spaces while smaller craft attend to smaller blazes.
Now I'm no firefighter but I do know a little something about forests, as A> I have a slight clue and B> I am from Santa Cruz and therefore I've tended to have had facts about the environment pounded into me (along with plenty of fiction of course) and one thing I know about forests is that if they don't burn down every so often they just build up more and more crap and when they do burn they burn big. Redwoods spread seeds and also regrow from underground in response to fire, so it is especially important to have fire in redwood forests. However, fire is inconvenient for humans and so we prevent these things from occurring. Then we build homes in the forest, and you can see where I'm going from here. The moral is that many of our old growth forests are just waiting for a big enough fire to really get them going and then we might very well need repeateded bombings by 747 tankers to put the bastards out.
I admit that this is all just speculation and theory, but it's based on some facts anyway. That's the best kind of speculation :)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Sadly, this latest attempt to fight fire with massive loads of water (and money) will be just as unsuccessful as most other efforts. We've put ourselves in a catastrophic situation by suppressing fires for so long, and Bush's idea to remove the fire hazard by removing trees (and not just adjacent to homes) is both counterproductive and another example of his plundering philosophy. Controlled (er, we hope they're controlled) burns are the only way to effectively eliminate the hazard.
I've concluded that the only way the massive fires will go away is when the last forest (/ tree farm) has burned. Once that's happened, fires will be a minor event as brush burns away and fire temperatures only rarely get up to blast furnace levels again.
Of course, the continuing drought may be a marker for permanent climate change, in which case, even more burning will take place. Look at Indonesia, Borneo, Mexico, the US West, and Florida, for example, in years past.
Whumpsnatz's law: If you ignore a problem long enough, it may go away.
Whumpsnatz's corollary: If you ignore a problem long enough, your job may go away.
This thing can lift 12 tons of water, and don't even need to land for re-fill, it can scoop full tank in 14 seconds on the fly. BE-200 Photos
Rather than cutting them up, why not cut a deal with the Russians and keep a few B52H bombers in water tanker service? With the appropriate firefighting gear in the bomb bay, it would be difficult if not impossible to revert back to a bomber; heck, give the Russians the contract for the firefighting mods.
After all, the BUFF has a proven track record of being stressed properly for low-altitude flight; there are plenty of retired USAF pilots and navigators out there who have 1000+ Time-in-Type, as well as mechanics, spare parts, etc.
...-.-
Besides, if you filled it up all the passengers would drown.
After working in the oil spill cleanup industry I seriously question the feasibility of this plane to be used in oil spills. Realistically there is one potential use and the is to use a dispersant. The use of a dispersant however is not a containment strategy but instead causes the oil molecules to bond with water which allow it to break down and prevent it from just pooling up on the surface. Typically a true containment strategy is a mix of containment boom and sorbents (cloth like materials that pick up only oil and not water). The main spills where the capacity of the 747 is likely to be utilized is something like the Prestige (Spain, 2002) or the Valdez. In both of these cases there was almost no chance that politically the oil would have been dispersed (recovery was the primary goal). So ultimately there may be a place for this plane in the use of oil spills however it is likely to be extremely limited.
Has a turbo-prop engine, not a turbofan. Dont know about the bombardier, but it may be the same. The 747 has turbofan engines. The C-130, designed for short field, rough field existance is likely more "proof" from FOD to the engines. Some visuals/descriptions on the engines for you.
emt 377 emt 4
Imagine a beowulf cluster...
Kevin Fox
that wasn't off-topic, you fool.
Still you wasted mod points on it... LOLOLOLOL
We can all sleep more soundly at night knowing that there will be 747 tankers available for those 'challenging homeland security' missions responding to chemical and/or biological attacks. If someone is so foolish as to unleash a chemical nerve gas attack on the town, the wise town leaders can place a quick telephone call to homeland security and order up a 747 tanker to respond and drop a load of 'chemical antidote' on us to ward off the ill effects. Yeppers, that should fix everyone up pretty good.
To my knowledge, the strips where the IL-76's operated from are nowhere near capable of landing even an -empty- 747-100. The only strip that can handle a 747 landing here in San Diego county is Lindberg Field (SAN-KSAN). (I don't think a 747 has landed here in years.) Note, the CDF (California Dept. of Forestry) operates from Gliespie Field (SEE) in El Cajon/La Mesa, and from Ramona. Neither of which are rated to even land a 737. (when I'm talking about rating, I'm meaning the wieght ratings of the tarmac and concrete for the landing strips)
As I walk through the valley of death I fear no one, for I am the meanest sonova bitch in the valley!
These jets cost a few HUNDRED MILLION to buy brand new. Used they're probably in the 30-40 Million range. They should look into smaller more maneuverable aircraft for this type of work.
A B-52 would be better. It is already low level qualified for years ( low level bombing with high drag dumb iron, ) and has a modern enough bombing system to have the ballistics for the water / chem package slewed into the computer, so as to hit any location a forward air controler calls in. Plus the crews out of Barksdale and Minot ( the 2 B-52 bases ) could still get decent training hours.
Why try and reinvent the wheel?
http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a1_262.html
But the real question is.. can you barrel roll that sucker..
"...The consensus at Boeing seems to be that a 747 would probably survive a barrel roll, but to try it would be, and I quote, "an extremely foolish action."
Perhaps it's best to consider other options besides fixed wing aircraft for fighting fires.
How about huge balloons like Zeppelins or blimps that carry water over the fire and drop it.
Perhaps even ultra large HYDROGEN filled blimps that use the hydrogen as fuel for the positioning propellers of the craft, then converting part of the hydrogen into water to drop on the fire. The H2-to-water conversion will create electricity for the fuel cells to power the aircraft back to base.
Whenever someone suggests using hydrogen as anti-ballast another person always says Hindenberg, referring to the air disaster in 1938. However, recent research has shown that the Hindenberg burned because the skin of the craft was covered highly flammable paint. This paint, which resembled modern rocket fuel, caused the craft to burn and crash so quickly. The disaster would have happened in a similar manner even if the Hindenberg had been filled with helium.
Another approach would be to cover the fire with a huge, very light, very thin, non-flammable blanket. This would remove the air from the burning embers rather than lowering the surface temperature below the ignition point, which is what the water drop does. A group of very large dirigibles (think about ten times as large as the Goodyear/Fuji blimp) would position the blanket over the blaze, lower it with winches, extinguish the flames, then lift it and reposition it over other flames. Sounds weird, doesn't it? So does using a 747, for Christ's sake, to drop water on a mountain forest fire.
Anyway, using a 747 for fire control sounds more like Evergreen is trying to both get rid of obsolete aircraft and get a huge tax write-off at the same time. This company has a LONG history of scamming the government with dubious projects at high profit for themselves.
Please use this as an opportunity to tell me how wrong I am and how ridiculous these ideas are. That is part of the process of coming up with new and innovative solutions to a serious problem (at least to us here in the Pacific Northwest) that we have not been able to solve and are running out of ideas and money.
After: The three most dangerous things you can hear at Evergreen...
Never shake hands with a man you meet in a fertility clinic.
...what you're talking about?
There are actually a lot of pros that I didn't think about initially. Besides the safety problem with diving into fire zones, there's also a fuel problem, since each climb out consumes almost as much as taking off. This constraint reduces the weight capacity of each mission -- many tankers seem to fly with only a fraction of their rated weight.
The ability to load a plane up to its full capacity with retardant, fly to a fire area, and make repeated, accurate drops from high altitude, without running out of gas, seems like a major plus to me. There are also benefits in being able to make "quick response" drops, eg from Smoke Jumper aircraft, with less risk.
---- "If we have to go on with these damned quantum jumps, then I'm sorry that I ever got involved" - Erwin Schrodinger
Try this gedanken experiment: Fill a bucket about half full of water. Now grab the bucket with both hands and run down the street. Once you get up to speed, try to stop or turn quickly without spilling any water. In fact, try to do it without letting the weight shift inside the bucket.
You see, as soon as you try to quickly change speed or direction, the weight shifts. When 24,000 gallons of water shifts, you have a lead sinker on your hands.
Watch the videos of those planes crashing. That is exactly what it looks like happened. The pilot tried to pull up, but the water shifted, and the plane lost it's wings under the intense weight shift.
This reminds me of a friend in highschool who's dream car was a hearse with a waterbed in the back. Sounds like a good idea untill you try to turn a corner at any speed greather than 5 mph!
By the way, Shane, if you are reading this, contact me.
A lot of previous comments wonder how well a 747 will handle mountainous terrain. Well that got me wondering, does it have to be a stock plane? Perhaps there are some relatively simple modifications that will help a 747 maneuver a better in tight airspaces. Maybe an extra engine or bigger flaps, or -- as another poster has already mentioned -- not fill the entire plane to capacity.
Also, a cost note. Aren't there a 1000-odd planes parked in the Nevada desert? I have no idea how many are 747's, but there must be a few. So using a 747 may be a lot more cost effective than designing a new plane or buying existing water bomber.
A C-17 can land on a carrier as well.
-- &&
Just use daisy cutters........blow the fire out and level any of that pesky underbrush...
At least a military aircraft would be designed for the maneuvers required to fight forest fires.
But really, these machines are VAST, and are turbojets the right engines for low-altitude use? I don't think so. You want an engine optimized for close-to-the-ground operation, that will spool up quickly so you have power when you need it.
Fun image
More like how many planes would it take to cover john goodman?
The end result is that more water can be dropped in a day. This is what matters.
The company that is doing this with the 747 is the same company that has the Spruce Goose on display in their museum. Why don't we finally put that plane to use? It can already land on water (i.e. scoop up the water), and should be able to carry a huge load. The stall speed issue should not be as much of a problem as with a 747. The only question is if it can fly more than 20' off the water.
One of the reasons that Croatia joined the "Coalition of the Desperate, Shifty and Bribed" against Iraq was that they got enough money to float the note on four of these puppies. War on Terrorism, hell. You need to see the effects on the summer adiabatic winds on the Dalmatian coast. Summer fires pop up like crazy not unlike what happens in Southern California.
Anyhow, they are awesome to see in action. Dive down the Adriatic, scoop up a bunch of water then drop it. Over and Over. I saw one plane make five passes at the island of Brac last summer in less than an hour. Impressive machine with great pilot work as well.
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
I don't think it can do an inflight replenishment like the worldest largest active flying boats...
www.martinmars.com/mars.html
must we slashdot all the servers on the net?
They deliver the videos to your doorstep!
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 loaded with videotape.
Divide the bucket into two sealed compartments. Fill one compartment fully with water, while leaving the other one empty...
Given that planes have been used in fighting fires for rather some time now, I'm guessing they have considered the problems.
Im a bit out of the loop here. Is the John Goodman the new slashdot metric of volume? If so, could some gracious soul please list a conversion table between the new and old metric? Thank you.
Having worked in the aerial firefighting industry, I can agree with most of the analysis to date on the dangers associated with using rigid wing, transport type aircraft for fire fighting operations. The stresses associated with dropping water are not conducive to longevity in these aircraft.
Even before they were put in to use as fire bombing aircraft, the C-130A models provided to those companies by the government had a history of wing spar failures due to fatigue... that's the biggest reason they were removed from service. Supplying this aircraft to the fire bombing companies was a huge mistake by the government in the first place.... C-130s are not good fire bombers.
P-3's are also not a good platform for a fire bomber, as the wing is too rigid, and the "A" model P-3's being supplied were also known for having their wings fall off... the civialian version of the P-3 was the Lockheed Electra turbo-prop airliner, which again had a history for loosing their wings due to spar fatigue.
The P-2 Neptune on the other hand has one of the most flexible wings in service, and, other than a narrow body / limited wing spar / bomb bay clearance, which limites tank capacity (from 1800-2200 gallons, depending on who manufactured the tanks), are an excellent firefighting platform. This limit also means that the P-2 is carrying less than half of it's max rated payload with a full load of retardant. The few aerial firefighting P-2's I've heard of being lost were due to pilot error, I don't know of one that was lost due to fatigue (though it is possible.)
The Japanese modified their P-2 Anti-Submarine Warfare aircraft to use turboprops, so it would be fairly straightforward to replace the R-3350 radial piston engines currently on the P-2 if this became a concern.
Non-pressurized aircraft, like the P2, also have fewer problems with fatigue due to pressurization / depressurization cycles... which both the P3 and C-130 suffer from.
Grounding all 33 of the larger air tankers was a stupid, reactionary move... the P-2's should be returned to service ASAP, as they are likely some of the safest aircraft to use for aerial firefighting. Grounding the C-130s, P-3s and other, World War II era aircraft (Like the PB4Y-2 which was lost in Colorado, a Navy single tail variant of the B-24!) makes sense, until they can be properly inspected / documented for return to service or permanent removal.
A 747, or even a C130, will have to land at a conventional airport, and use conventional pumps to take on a load of water.
Here is an account of their use. They carry 1450 gallons. Those would be 160 ounce Imperial gallons, not your smaller 128 ounce American gallons.
I reckon the world is on fire every fscking day of the year !
but no 747 to be seen.
r.
Oh WTH - In SOVIET RUSSIA 24,000 Gallons of Vodika isn't enough...
Here's a link that discusses aerial firefighting, if you're interested. There's some info on the CL-215 in it.
Ah, that's what those oxygen masks are for!
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If you still have trouble believeing that prop thrust footprint is significant, then these little bits of info should help. Some of the Vietnam air combat losses were jet aircraft shot down by old prop driven fighters at altitudes under 10,000 ft. And even more significant is the fact that helicopters use rotary wings (large diameter propellors) instead of a 20 ton turbo-fan jet engine to supply the lift.
Also, Jet turbines spool up slowly, that is why Navy pilots land on aircraft carriers with the engines close to full throttle, and the plane 'dirtied up', so if they miss the cable, they can have full thrust and more quickly retract the airbrakes for a lift off than waiting for the turbine to increase in rpm to increase thrust. While they roll of the end of the carrier deck.
Actually, who bother with a Boeing 747 is may not be structurally sound for low-altitude firebombing missions?
Recently, Boeing proposed an idea of using C-17A Globemaster III transports dropping 2,800 beachball-sized containers filled with water or fire retardant in a wide pattern some 2,000 feet above the fire. This means you could deliver up 144,000 pounds of fire surpressant in a wide pattern, which means more of a fire can be quench with such a plane. And because it is dropped around 2,000 feet in the air, that means the plane will fly in far less hazard conditions than firebomber planes do now.
If you check out the Popular Mechanics web site, the proposal is mentioned here: http://tinyurl.com/2otpd
Another interesting proposal is to bombard a fire with artillery sheels filled with liquid nitrogen. Why liquid nitrogen? Because it has these advantages: 1) the extreme cold of liquid nitrogen will quickly slow down a fire, 2) the presence of that much nitrogen gas expansion will snuff out the oxygen needed to feed and fire and 3) liquid nitrogen quickly boils away, so you don't have an enviromental hazard like you do with some chemcial fire retardants.
Why not a C-5 Galaxy?
.. when you could have one of these!
The A-10 would make a stellar firefighting aircraft. There's been a detailed proposal to do just that for about 7 years. They've even done a demo out in CA.
http://www.firehogs.com/a10demo.shtml
Some feel thinking is a pleasure. Others feel it's a chore. Most, having never tried it, have no feel for it at all.
They're slowly decommisioning these things, as they bring in more KC-10s. As I recall, the 135 carries 181,000 lbs of fuel (lighter than water). You could keep the wing takes for flying and the belly tank for fire suppresion. That'd still give you around 60,000-80,000 gallons. Sweeeet!
I drank what? -- Socrates
A rigid airship the size of the old Akropn would be the most effective firefighting ariel platform one could buy. With a cargo-lift capacity of 100 TONS, you could easily deliver the retardant in a single super-storm, or you could use a couple high-velocity turrets underneath the thing. It can stay stationery for a long period of time, improving accuracy, and most important, it's fireproof (assuming you fill it with helium and not hydrogen).
"Curiosity killed the cat, but for a while I was a suspect."- Steven Wright
Actually there is a company that created a firetanker out of an A-10 warthog.
www.firehogs.com
Strong, carries a hug load, and can turn on a dime
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I have a better idea: let this fires burn. If the forest service would start fires every year like nature intended they would have tiny fires that any homeowner could easily prevent from burning down their house.
The only exception to that is mountain areas of California where the trees depend on big fires, and nature conspires to cause big fires. Anyone stupid enough to live in those areas deserves to rebuild out of their own pocket every year. Those of us from outside of California tend to agree that stupid describes the mindset of people who live there... :)
Seriously, there are no one size fits all answers, but most areas of the planet would be better off with yearly forest fires.
...at the following address:
r tankerstream-2.wmv
http://www.evergreenaviation.com/supertanker/supe
That thing must be a bitch to fly when it's fully loaded.
I am so proud to be part of the human race right now, I could just puke. .
-FL
Even with 4 airports in the State, do you think the round trip time is going to average less than 40 minutes? Toronto and Buffalo are about 100 miles apart. But flying there takes about 20 minutes, because the plane has to climb to cruising altitude. Then they have to descend again. Your 747 water bomber would have to descend too, in order to deposit a payload accurately. Plus there is still the loading up of the water payload...
The 12 seconds the water-bomber needs is hard to compete with.
I heard they found the burnt body of a skin diver still in his rubber suit that was accidentally sprayed over some California fire. ;)