AvWeek went out on a demonstration flight of Evergreen Aviation’s 747 firefighting tanker and came away fairly impressed.
Key Quote: “The Evergreen 747 SOAP evaluation earlier this year dispelled many of those preconceptions. ‘The entire SOAP team was surprised at how maneuverable the 747 was in the confines of a fire traffic area,’ says Pat Norbury, USFS national aviation operations officer. ‘We expected much larger [flight] patterns and less utility in rough terrain. But it was actually quite maneuverable. It had no problem working with the lead plane [a King Air 90] … and making drops.’ The team concluded that ‘the [Evergreen] 747 appears to be a very viable resource for fire retardant and water delivery,’ she says.”
Using modified 747s as “super tankers” dropping tons of water on wildfires is an idea that’s been kicking around a couple years. I wrote about it back in 2004. http://www.heraldnet.com/stories/04/05/19/bus_corliss001.cfm
Key Quote: “A 747 tanker can deliver as much water or retardant – 2,500 gallons – in one second as most current tankers can deliver each trip. The supertanker, Evergreen argues, carries so much liquid that it can be used against more than one fire on each trip.”
A plane that big would have a hard time negotiating some canyons, Evergreen officials told me back then. But it would be great for backing up firelines atop ridgelines, for dumps in rolling hill country and for putting out fires in open rangeland.
My knowledge of fighting wildfires is limited to what the fire boss at the Kaniksu National Forest showed me one time when I was doing a story on a small forest fire burning near Priest River, Idaho, some 20 years ago. But I was thinking something like the 747 tanker would have been extremely handy, a couple weeks ago, when wildfires above Lake Chelan began threatening the settlement at Stehekin, which sits in a forested valley at the head of the lake.
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