#aerial firefighting

[nocternalrandomness]

"Super Scooper 261" on the Columbia River

[thatdisasterauthor]

Has the grounding of the DC-10 affected your firefighting, or were those mostly used in other states?

YEP.

There are currently 9 DC-10s still in use in the US. Four of them belong to the company 10 Tanker, which does aerial firefighting operations. (Other companies only have one or two, and they're used for other things.) They can work all over the US, and actually can only be deployed out of certain airports due to their size. We can't take them out of my dispatch center because the runway of our airport isn't long enough, but I believe there's one or two airports on the front range of Colorado that can take them (and that have retardant plants to be able to actually fill them). They were used on at least the Lee Fire in Colorado this year, if I'm remembering correctly (or they at least tried to order them, IDK if they actually got here or if they were diverted elsewhere), maybe some others. In the winter they also take contracts in other countries, so IDK what those countries are doing right now with the planes grounded.

The DC-10 is considered a VLAT, aka Very Large Air Tanker, the biggest of the firefighting aircraft which carry the largest loads. As far as I'm aware, these four DC-10s are our ONLY VLATs. So. Yeah. Losing them is nooooot great.

There are plenty of other firefighting planes and helicopters available still, and in a pinch there's a way to convert C-130s into temporary tankers using a modular system, so it's not like we're totally screwed or anything. But if the DC-10 issue isn't resolved before fire season speeds back up next spring, it probably will hurt us. My guess is we'd see the C-130 option getting utilized a lot more.

This isn't exactly an unexpected issue, though. We've known our aerial firefighting fleet is on its last legs for awhile now. We put these planes through fucking hell, and they're pretty much always already fairly used when we get them and retrofit them (not always, but a lot of the time). Hopefully this will be a wake up call to really start working on the problem, though I doubt this administration gives a shit, so who knows.

[phantomskunk]

AG600M Kunlong, photos by Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC)

[themissingmango]

[beccawise7]

Mother nature in all its fury & wonder...

This is known as a Firenado.

This fire behavior is extremely dangerous & is caused by a rotating updraft, which spreads the fire at a critically dangerous speed and causes extreme danger to firefighters both on the ground and in the air.

This video was captured yesterday at the Deer Creek Fire in La Sal, UT.

Fire fighters are forced to stand down until Mother Nature cooperates & they can begin normal fire operations again.

Love our firefighters & always amazed at mother nature. ✌️

~beccawise7💜🖤

[ghostpyre]

2013 Beaver Creek Fire by BLMIdaho

[lifejoy-co]

This DC-10 is fighting the fires in Australia

[bobakiddo]

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