Fire Warnings

Meanwhile, a friend’s view from his house in Marin Headland :(

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hifiandmtb said:
I repeat - we need a fleet of these:


Instead, we get a fleet of these:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attack-class_submarine

We be fucked up in the fucking head.
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Only issue is the ongoing costs of them. Theyre a huge money sink for the amount we would use them. To have them sitting in the shed for 95% of the time, whilst having continued staffing, support, maintenance and crews on the books. Thats per plane, then you need spotter planes, the facilities to store them, staff to refill them with retardant etc etc

Its pretty much $1 per litre to drop fire retardant (just the retardant itself), so think the big dc10s is 40k per drop and they can manage 8-10 drops in a day, and that drop will go for 1-1.5km. Thats a huge amount of money, which I know last year took up a huge amount of the budget for firefighting activities

Realistically we need more ongoing contracts with the guys over in the US to supply them here for the vast majority of the fire season IMO. But its also good to remember we do also have a large number of contract helicopters and some Air Tractors based in Australia to help out
 
There needs to be more of these globally, swapping hemispheres. Like the air cranes, they're in service all year round basically which makes them economic(ish).

Although of course now we have more overlap of northern and southern hemisphere fire seasons, we'll just need even more of them...
 
So fucking what if it costs a lot!

Did you see how much we are spending on fucking submarines - for some nefarious purpose?

Fires will rage through Straya from now until the end of time, and they cost us billions - we should treat bushfire prevention with the vigour we throw at terrorism or COVID19 prevention:

Economic impact of Australia's bushfires set to exceed $4.4bn cost of Black Saturday

In. Excess. Of. Four. Point. Four. Billion. Dollars.

And don't forget, three billion animals killed or seriously affected by these fires in January.

These fires will be back.
 
I was talking to a guy at a BBQ last summer who is a helicopter engineer, so assume some bias here, but his argument was very much against the large planes.

He felt Australia needs a fleet of sky crane helicopters, because of the ability to deploy them from smaller airfields, easier to manoeuvre in difficult terrain and the fact that they can refill the tanks without landing from dams or even suburban swimming pools.

Agree wholeheartedly that those billions should be spent on an effective firefighting infrastructure rather than redundant military equipment.

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hifiandmtb said:
So fucking what if it costs a lot!

Did you see how much we are spending on fucking submarines - for some nefarious purpose?

Fires will rage through Straya from now until the end of time, and they cost us billions - we should treat bushfire prevention with the vigour we throw at terrorism or COVID19 prevention:

Economic impact of Australia's bushfires set to exceed $4.4bn cost of Black Saturday

In. Excess. Of. Four. Point. Four. Billion. Dollars.

And don't forget, three billion animals killed or seriously affected by these fires in January.

These fires will be back.
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Ok I did edit my post and was literally about to press update but chose not to, because I didnt want to make this about submarines.

NOBODY WANTS SUBMARINES

Thats besides the point. But as someone who worked frontline on these planes, there is better areas to be spending money on to assist with bushfires then spending a truckload of cash on planes. Do we need more planes? Arguably Yes. But just throwing money at it without context and just saying we need our own fleet of them is short sighted and in lieu of the bigger problem.

We could easily be able to resource a number of large planes through contracts with services already available from overseas. We just need to organise contracts with these services. Theres no benefit for us to spend hundreds of millions of dollars (billions?) to obtain, fitout, run these machines where we can organise them with other suppliers.
 
Also why not spend money to more aggressively thin out new growth trees and shrub and reduce fuel?



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Is there a potential compromise in all this?
Wasn't there talk of a bolt-on kit for a C-130 that allows it to be a firebomber? Maybe add additional C-130s to the RAAF inventory, but they are basically permanently seconded to aerial firefighting unless there's a sudden strategic lift requirement. Firies get access to aerial platforms, RAAF gets more platforms for pilots to log hours in and a reserve fleet. They can also be sent overseas to support when not needed during winter months.
The C-130 can do short-field takeoff/landing if required so you can overcome some of the disadvantages of fixed-wing vs rotary...
 
mike14 said:
Is there a potential compromise in all this?
Wasn't there talk of a bolt-on kit for a C-130 that allows it to be a firebomber? Maybe add additional C-130s to the RAAF inventory, but they are basically permanently seconded to aerial firefighting unless there's a sudden strategic lift requirement. Firies get access to aerial platforms, RAAF gets more platforms for pilots to log hours in and a reserve fleet. They can also be sent overseas to support when not needed during winter months.
The C-130 can do short-field takeoff/landing if required so you can overcome some of the disadvantages of fixed-wing vs rotary...
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implementing aerial firefighting into the RAAF would never get happen though. Way too much risk. And for the crew, not enough pay!
You’re better off offering the local ag guys a shit load of beer to fly the air tractors instead :)
 
the argument for the big planes over the choppers is they can deploy to remote areas quickly. really we need both...

I didn't say we shouldn't do it, the dollars is a big hit - but totally justified.
 
frenchman said:
implementing aerial firefighting into the RAAF would never get happen though. Way too much risk. And for the crew, not enough pay!
You’re better off offering the local ag guys a shit load of beer to fly the air tractors instead :)
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Sorry for the confusion. I'm not saying the RAAF would do the flying. They'd own the planes, and get them when not needed for firefighting duties. They'd have a firefighting aircrew (I'm assuming these are contracted) when required
 
mike14 said:
Sorry for the confusion. I'm not saying the RAAF would do the flying. They'd own the planes, and get them when not needed for firefighting duties. They'd have a firefighting aircrew (I'm assuming these are contracted) when required
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I don’t think it’d be practical or cost effective. Ex military rigs are usually stripped of all the voodoo shit before conducting civilian ops. And finding rated pilots for a herc that can do ad hoc firefighting in aus would be too hard.
 
Haakon said:
not sure if serious...
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Totally serious.

I'm not confident we can muster up enough resources to put out really big fire storms.

Perhaps the better strategy is defence in depth with large buffer zones around population centres with seriously thinned out bush to starve fire fronts of fuel.

It's low tech and would require lots of planning and man hours but if we're happy to spend bug dollars on fire fighting, why not?


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