Crew qualifications in this are interesting. The report that PIC was endorsed low level but there is no mention of 250 hours or low level qualifications of the FO or FE.
I'm not sure what would apply to the FE as in the case of Hercs, is a PFE not a pilot FE. I would have thought. any FE operating in this environment would need some extra training although it is possible that both had some prior USAF training that was not documented. If so why did CASA not ask prior to operations commencing?
What is also interesting is that all 3 crew appear to have been reservists. Their hours are very low verses the time spent in the forces. I wouild be interested to know if the UASF reservists had a different minimum altitude dump level to the private fire bombers? There may be something on that within the Fire Aviation website.
I would suggest that under the CASA system it would be very hard to blend the crop dusting time with heavy aircraft time. Multi crew ops are very different to single pilot ops. Anyone who has both would in normal times stay in the airline industry. For any operator fire bombing with heavies would surely be seen by crew as a stepping stone up or maybe a retirement job. Given the flying, intermittent pay and anti social work conditions I would suspect not too many airline pilots would want this as a retirement job.
I may also be jumping too soon but its interesting that in a short period of less than a year there have been 2 critical avionics and avionics procedure failures of US fire bombers out of a very small sample of aircraft. In this case it seems that the voice recorder had tripped in the US and was not picked up for a long period. There was no procedure to check it on a daily basis either . In my experience on "heavies" this would to be checked each sector by crew or engineering or both . Earlier there was a situation where a VLA left the West Coast of the US bound for Australia with no operational HFs. The antennae connections were sitting detached from the transceivers and neither engineering checks nor crew checks picked that up. Again normal airline ops would have checked this on the ground..
Maybe just coincidence or is the standard of at least avionics maintenance a bit lower than would be expected?
At this stage its too early to call, but if this keeps up I cant help but think that the imports are being held to a lower standard than the locals?.
Wunwing
Last edited by Wunwing; 25th Sep 2020 at 07:19.