Yeah it is true. We don't always get them. The combination of the pine beetle in BC that has left huge areas covered with dead slash and hot,dry weather has  made their fire seasons really nasty. In Alberta it has been more or less normal except for the spring when the combination of careless bozos on quads and winter dried forest fuels make for some really fast moving fires. Add to that a municipality like Fort Mac that didn't think they needed to do anything to fireproof its fringes and you have Fort Mac happening.  Luckily most municipalities have now learned that allowing people to live next to, or in the bush means that those areas or structures have to be fire proofed to the extent possible.

That being said when it is hot, dry and windy enough for long enough, everything is fuel. 

I don't think it will slack off. 

Yeah that's me in the copilots seat of a typical birddog. What I do is the directing of the drops, airspace control and comms, etc while the pilot flies the plane and formates on the tankers and helps me with comms when it gets too busy( if hes not too busy)

 As for the skimming I have ridden in a CL215 while the guys were on a practice and it is busy in there. Basically they do a normal approach to a lake once they assess if it is skimmable, get it down on the step (that is skimming on the floats) and then they will drop the two water probes at the same time as upping the power as the scooping  creates a tremendous drag. There are two probes each smaller than a typical hood scoop on a car by a lot (the opening of each is about 4 inches by 6 inches) The forward motion of the airplane at about 90 knots will force the water in to the two tanks until both are filled to max of 600 to 700 gallons each in about 20/30 seconds of scooping. (They'll take less if there is full fuel on board early in the mission)  

Then they up probes, hit takeoff power and hit the sky again. While o the way back to the fire they may at my request inject a measured amount of fire smotherng foam concentrate to make the water more effective. One they release the load it mixes in the turbulent water as it descend to the ground.  With the four airplane CL 215 group in Alberta and an optimum lake distance about 3 miles they on average can put a load a fire about every 2 minutes. Then its back to the lake to do it all over again until we cease action or low on fuel.  Further lakes mean less water delivered in a given time.  These 215T's can haul the long term retardent red stuff from a tanker base but they are inefficient compare to the Electra or Convair 580 so we usually don't do that.

The pilots can do 30-40 take offs and landing skims in that periods so they are working their butts off.

The single pilot Firebosses are even tougher work as there is only the one guy in the cockpit and we can work off smaller lakes than the 215 so we can be even closer to a fire.

Its not uncommon to do 8 hours day when there is a fire bust.

Lots of variables on a a given fire from topography to wind to fire behavior to ground resources available to air resources available to lake distance, to incoming weather other priorities etc. In Alberta we also use 5 different tanker types from the CL215T's to the Electra (as in the video) to the convair 580 to the Firebosses to the Airtractor 802's plus a lot of bucketing helicoptors so there is a lot of variety there too. Any of those can show up on any given fire.

-- Edited by 66 Grande guy on Wednesday 20th of February 2019 01:23:58 AM

-- Edited by 66 Grande guy on Wednesday 20th of February 2019 01:32:23 AM

Not that I've ever seen. Usually if they are sitting on the lake they are broken or they are the MARs which is a pure flying boat and is not amphibious.

Carring a loading pump on a skimmer is kind of pointless and would take away from some of the usable load