wow – sense has previaled over corporate business

The primary purpose of heavy air tankers is not to direcly extinguish fires – in fact, dropping large quantities of retardant directly onto a fire will often just “blow” the fire outwards from the drop zone and cause it to spread. The heavy tankers usually lay down a barrier of retardant (its a mixture of water and chemicals that actually sticks to trees and such like) on the area immediately surrounding a fire, and thus prevents the fire spreading – the fire effectively burns itself out as all the combustable material in the area already burning is consumed.

One of the benefits of the smaller tankers (up to P-2 Neptune size, etc) is / was that they could get into fairly confined areas – canyons etc – to drop on fires that often occur in such areas. Clearly the 747 tanker will not be as manoueverable but would have benefits wetting large unburned areas somewhat more quickly than conventional tankers could do it.

exactly! another “issue” is the need to build more bases to actually fill up these beasts – most airfields where air tankers are based now are simply too small.

I think any operations in the USA would be on low lying flat areas like California – can’t imagine them here in Colorado at this altitude and rugged terrain!

anyway, I’d rather see the old birds fly.

here are some shots taken at my local airport yesterday

try this

locations to go to – list of aircraft stored etc

and he didn’t even use any rudder!

I have friends that have either flown for them or do fly for them – I’m too polite to ask for figures, but as you may imagine, a captians salary on any airline is comfortable enough.

enough – obviously not as much as the big jet/airlines – but you mostly get to sleep in your own bed every night

btw – there are only captians with Aurigny on the Tri – single pilot IFR operation

and you get to perform some interesting low level ops and landings on grass at times

Some of the comments about him from the Sydney Spotting forum are not always so favourable. I met him over at SYD a while back and have my own thoughts :rolleyes: He does take some cracking pics though!

you know what – I just visted that link to his photos on a.net and, yes they are good, but of course they should be given that kind of access.

I can probably understand where you are coming from with the quote above – after reading all his comments about his own photos, I think he needs to stick more to the facts, as he seems to be coming off as “rubbing it in” to the casual observer.