This is just awesome flying...take a five minute break to watch this. Call
it a moment of zen.


Water bombing forest fires

Very courageous and skilled pilots. The shots of the pilot wrestling with
the controls is revealing...


The old company, Bombardier Aerospace, makes these. They don't motor around
to fill the tanks---they touch down at approach speed, open the fill scoops,
add lots of power, and the tanks fill in seconds. There is one scene in the
film where you can see the two tank level gauges rapidly go up. The other
neat thing is watching the magnitude of the flight control inputs,
especially aileron, as they are maneuvering down low---sometimes the pilot
is literally going stop to stop. Real flying!


< <http://player.vimeo.com/video/48642618>
http://player.vimeo.com/video/48642618>

Badass,,, at 0:42 the look on the pilots face is priceless!

@ 2:156 what the hell is going on with the controls?? pilot doing 1 thing and the copilot doing something different?? are they not hooked up together??

@ 2:156 what the hell is going on with the controls?? pilot doing 1 thing and the copilot doing something different?? are they not hooked up together??

I think both those hands belong to the copilot.

Talk about "yanking and banking"!!!

Geez that's cool!!!

tcj wrote:

@ 2:156 what the hell is going on with the controls?? pilot doing 1 thing and the copilot doing something different?? are they not hooked up together??

I think both those hands belong to the copilot.

Duh, went back and looked again?? It was the throttles he was pushing, I thought it was the pilots yoke!! PAY ATTENTION GEORGE!!

Awesome! When I was a kid I had not idea that the movie "Always" was a romance; I thought it was a totally awesome movie about fighting fires with airplanes. I used to watch it all the time because all I wanted to be was a pilot and a firefighter. Oh if I was single...

There are usually two CL415 water bombers based at the airport about a mile from my house. When I take off or land on Borden Lake I am always watchful for the tankers, as they call themselves, and the bird dog aircraft that usually fly with them. My climb out from take off usually takes me right through the approach path to runway 28 at the airport so I am always diligent about listening and making the appropriate radio calls on the unicom frequency. During some local forest fires I have watched them scoop water right off our lake.

At the Chapleau airport

There's a row reserved for them and the other BLM birds on Fort Wainwright, too! Really cool aircraft.

We need a few of these based in the Western US for Wildfire Season!

ViperPilot wrote:We need a few of these based in the Western US for Wildfire Season!

The problem is they need pretty large lakes to work, and in much of the inter mountain west, it's a long ways between lakes and fires.

In AK, they weren't allowed to scoop from the Yukon River for fear of hitting logs or other drift and damaging the probes. Hulls are hell for stout, but with a damaged probe, they'd be useless. At a fire near Eagle, they were flying 40 minute one way legs......pretty in efficient.

By comparison, they worked a fire near one of my project sites on the Yukon Flats, scooping from the lake my crew and I were on. Three 215s, and they were each turning about every five or six minutes....fire was a couple miles away.

Also, in this country they don't carry retardant, because they'd have to be thoroughly cleaned out prior to scooping from water....retardant is not good in lakes, so in areas with few "scoop able" waterbodies, they aren't very useful. In Europe, I understand they also carry retardant.

There is a LOT of bias in our wild land fire fighting community.....and it has taken a loooong time and the grounding of most heavy air tankers for this bureaucracy to even consider the use of these aircraft in fire fighting. For perspective, it took years for them to accept the Cessna Caravan as a drop ship, even for para cargo......didn't have enough motors.

Same happened with single engine air tankers (SEAT). It took the grounding of virtually all the heavy air tanker fleet (after three catastrophic in flight failures and a determination by a "Blue Ribbon Committee" on air tankers) before they started using SEAT more widely. And that same committee grounded a number of other aircraft that were in widespread use in the fire community.

This was all federal level stuff, and some states have been much more accepting of these aircraft than the Feds. MN has owned two CL215s for many years, and leased two others, and Cal Fire (CDF) has done its own thing for years. But, these things are so expensive, and fire seasons are short locally, so if you can't "farm out" these craft to a number of agencies, they get mighty expensive, and the Feds are the big user.

Many years ago, some Canadair (original builder of the 215) sales types were caught bribing an Alaskan legislator (who went to jail) which killed any likelihood that the State of AK would buy these things. And these work really well in AK.

There are a LOT of these airplanes in Europe, where politics and "rules" are different, and bribery of officials may be more common. Several years ago, we were coming through Lyon, FR on commercial air, and the ramp there was solid yellow and red....impressive lineup.

These have been out of production for a number of years now. Will be interesting to see if they ever go back into production. I've heard there are a couple of 415s still on the line, unfinished.

MTV

Great footage, Id be struggling to think of any other camera angle shots - they covered it really well. Must have taken a long time to piece together.

Those 215 and 415's have a functional beauty much akin to an A-10 or a Zenair…

This was a really exciting video to watch!

Here is another video of CL415 water bombers picking up water very close to a public beach in Ontario.

Awesome! Loved the videos.