why can't our current fleet of Military CJ130 Herc's be converted to fire bombers during the fire season and have the military chip in with fighting these fires, instead of playing uckers and table tennis during summer because its too hot to go outside!
good training for both pilots and ground crews, If you can bomb water at low altitude in extreme conditions, you shouldn't have any trouble bombing bad dudes in far away lands
I think there's a few reasons, although I also feel that this season might be a 'ground zero' moment and we are (finally) going to see some changes to how the country deals with fires moving forward. None of the reasons are insurmountable, but cost, apathy and direction/focus all build up to where we are now;
- Cost of the kit: Who's going to pay for it? Defence will say their budget is all spent, the government has said the States should bear most of the cost
- Cost of the planes: Extra flight hours means that the platforms will require more maintenance and reach their end-of-life quicker, this means there will be a likely decrease in readiness for RAAF to respond to other incidents and they'll need more $$ to perform maintenance more often. (Readiness levels are set by government policy so can be changed easily enough)
- Readiness cycle and deployability: the ADF's first role is to provide readiness at a level set by government so every flight hour that is taken for training, equipping and fighting fires is an hour less of readiness preparation and training for the 'core' job.
To make it easier for families (school year, work stand down etc) the ADF uses the end of year (fire season) for its posting cycle. This means that personnel are relocating around the country and so less available for taskings. It's also the main leave period as they use the rest of the year for training. Again both of these can be altered, but would likely have an impact on combat readiness (short term) and retention (longer term).
The big one here is asset management. We don't have a very big lift capacity as it is, and some of it is required to be on short-notice readiness. If we convert the fleet to water-bombers, but then sudden;y decide that we need to go to Iran (for example...) the planes are going to be pulled from fire-fighting duties anyway to support the military operations.
- Usefulness: Allegedly, because I'm certainly not an expert, the modifications aren't actually that good in Australian conditions due to dispersal method. It's fine for Northern Hemisphere fires, but much less effective against the fuel type we have.
- Logistics: A lot of the assets aren't in the most useful place for fire response. Moving them, and their support crews, plus finding runway and hanger space all costs $$, which once again will cause huge fights over who foots the bill.
My .2c? The cost of fitting out the RAAF fleet would be better spent building a dedicated national fleet of fire aircraft (I think this was an ALP election promise?), with the RAAF (and wider ADF) having some capacity to provide support to that force when required. The benefit there is also that we can loan/lease it out to other countries when the require assistance.
The ADF/Federal Govt need to also develop better plans for supporting fires etc across Australia, which includes the government calling on identified force elemnets to respond much quicker and much more efficiently than they have been so far
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