Some 10s in wildland firefighting: 10 tankers
Interesting - didn’t know they were used for firefighting. Does the flame-putter-outer-dust tankage extend into the passenger cabin, too?
Looks like all of the tankage is external and belly mounted.
I’ve seen these guys in action before. It’s just unbelievable watching this big aircraft manuever like a crop duster.
Yeah–they are weigh under-weight, and very maneuverable. My ski buddy who flies them says there’s very little stress on the airframe. It’s a big plane, but look at unloaded air show maneuvers by 777s or A380s. Plus, these are pilots who are doing this stuff day in/day out, probably zero autopilot, 10 or more takeoffs and landings a day (ideally). one interesting thing my buddy said was that at the end of every day they need to be completely prepped to relocate–planes, pilots, mechanics, support, to potentially move from CO to OR or wherever. That sounds really tedious and expensive, if understandable.
Wow, that’s a helluva thing! Great video, Pork.
The weight of liquids or dense solids add up quickly so it’s pretty much restricted to the belly of an airplane.
Mountains can generate some serious updrafts and fires probably add to that. Large planes are designed for a more gentile flying experience.
If you noticed how precisely they laid down the material along the ridge line they would have certainly programmed a route into their GPS allowing for +/- deviations measured in feet.
If it’s a DC-10-30 fire plane what did they do with the center main gear? Pin it in place?
I don’t think we need to bring religion into it.
Not a pilot, but I would be very surprised if that were the case. A fire line is a very dynamic thing. Typically they have a small prop plane circling high and directing traffic in real time. Plus it’s a very high-speed operation, with planes landing and loading as quickly as possible. Plus, seems to me the mountain conditions and tricky air would pretty much require hand-flying. @LSLGuy ?
IANA fire pilot. What follows is 100% guesswork, albeit with some bit of professional aviation context.
I can see them using the usual airplane nav systems to get in the area or to hold in a designated spot out of the way until it’s their turn to drop. But I suspect all the drops are purely by eyeball based on the firespotter’s instructions and path to follow. As adjusted for wind. That’s sure how we did Close Air Support back in the day and a lot of it I’m told is still done that way.
As @Magiver suggests, it’d be useful to have lat/longs for the start of a run and a course to fly, but for the firespotter to figure out those coordinates and transmit them to the tanker, and have them input them, etc. is all in the too-hard-for-not-much-gain category IMO.
One of these days when stuff more like state of the art military gear is available and affordable, I could imagine a firespotter with a Tv/IR cam and a laser designator in a turret who could lase a point on a ridge and his computer would compute the GPS coords of the laser spot, then datalink them to the tanker where the pilots could approve uploading that into the nav system. But knowing how grossly underfunded all this stuff is today, I bet they don’t have that. Yet.
From my upstairs office window where I have a good view of the Santa Ynez mountains, I’ve had a front row seat for several mountain firefighting operations. I have multiple radios, monitoring the ground frequencies, ground-to-air, and air-to-air comms. I also have a local ADS-B receiver tracking aircraft location, sometimes with more coverage than the online services when I have line-of-sight to operation that might be behind a ridge for the regional receivers.
The air support configuration seems to be pretty standard. There will be a single controller aircraft circling above firefighting operations. That controller will coordinate all air support in and out of the fire area. Helicopters typically fly low level back and forth from a local reservoir to the area they are dousing and back.
The big tankers typically follow a scout plane that indicates the drop zone with a smoke trail. Sometimes, like in the video I attached, the big tankers aren’t working with a scout, but that’s rare in my experience. Usually has to do with the scout not being on scene yet or off refueling.
In all of the cases, the ground crews are radioing their support requests, as well as info about where they’re working, to the controller aircraft. It can often be a three-way conversation of a ground crew leader, the air controller and the tanker/scout pilot of where exactly to put the retardant, with the ask changing slightly even as the tanker/scout pair is on a close approach.
All of that is a long-winded way of saying that as I have observed, those guys are hand-flying all the way. They don’t know the exact location of their drop often until a minute or less from the actual event.
It is fascinating and terrifying to watch. They horse those big aircraft through gaps and around peaks in a way that can be sphincter-clenching.
Absolutely watch this video. You can see the scout marking the drop area with smoke (have to look carefully through the fire haze) and then the DC-10 comes in to give the trees a haircut, almost.
I just read an interesting article about how the air defense folks in Moscow are routinely jamming or spoofing GNSS (collective / generic term for the US’s GPS, Russia’s GLONASS, Europe’s Gallileo, & China’s BeiDou) in and around Moscow. Lots of problems for folks like taxi drivers when the map app in their phone suddenly places them 500km away, or just gives up and says “I have no clue where we are, so no clue how to get where you want to go”.
Relevant to this thread, this is also snarling airline traffic through Moscow. Nowadays Russia doesn’t have too many flights to/from the outside world, but substantially all longer-haul flying internal to Russia is hubbed through Moscow. And when the GNSS goes apeshit most flying comes to a halt. Apparently the Russians had gotten to the point of decommissioning most of their VORs and whatever indigenous Soviet-equivalent systems there may have been. So without reliable GNSS the airplanes sit. Oops.
Lest we get too complacent or laugh at their predicament, remember that FAA is hell-bent on going down the same path. If at some future time we need GNSS denial to defend against GNSS-driven attackers, we too will be in that same silly all-aviation-grounded boat. Of course boats = big ships are equally screwed, albeit more slowly, if GNSS denial makes harbor entries much slower and more dangerous.
… and this is why the ground crews are so worried about the location of a retardant drop. Even the load from a small aircraft will demolish equipment (and people) in the path.
@Pork_Rind. Great finds.
In the first vid that you posted of the DC-10 drop at Silverado there was a fire spotter that led him down that ridgeline. The spotter didn’t leave a smoke trail, but he did clearly indicate which ridge line needed the retardant by his flight path and it would not take much additional verbiage to describe where to start & stop.
What you described is exactly how USAF & USN did / still do Close Air Support for Army & USMC forces. All the same ideas coordinated the same way. I used to fly FAC back when that was done in light planes. That approach isn’t survivable post abut 1990, and isn’t used any more. The OA-10 picked up where I left off, and nowadays I hear it’s more like @Magiver says, with somebody on the ground generating GPS coords to hit, and those somehow datalinking to a bomb-dropper to deliver.
Fires are darn dangerous to fly over / through / around. Fire-spotting or fire-bombing are not jobs I’d care to take on in my now less testosterone-enhanced dotage. But at least fires don’t shoot back.
I would never argue that’s not happening, but that isn’t what I’m hearing on the radio. It seems to exclusively involve specific ground features, the location of the fire front and compass headings. Subsequent drops often reference offsets from the obviously red-covered areas.
Jesus H Christ!!! “haircut” indeed!
The good news is once you drop you have a very agile aircraft, cos you might need it.
I was describing how USAF does combat close air support today. I agree 100% that’s not how aerial fire suppression is done today. Maybe in 20 years, but not now.