Originally Posted by
Big Pistons Forever
I have 17 years of firebombing experience, finishing up on the Lockheed Electra. The only airline guys we had worked their way up from bush operations before flying for an airline and kept their hands and feet up to speed flying homebuilts, floatplanes, warbirds etc. A zero straight to shiny jet guy never made it through training in my company, the kind of flying was just too different.
That being said the pure Ag or Beaver on floats guys never made it to the big iron fire bombers and did their whole career on VFR single pilot small tankers. Again the kind of flying was just too different.
Rings true with what I see in aero-medical. I see any number of recently retired airline captains who like the idea of a little light aero-medical flying to keep their hand in! (And it's always their "passion" - a turn-off word if ever.) The
only ones who make it are the very few people who've maintained a good level of GA and single-pilot flying. (For perspective, we don't do "emergencies", no landing on the highway, no unapproved ALAs.) Our aero-medical is just too different from airline work; the stresses and priorities are completely different. You can't fall back on an ops manual and route procedures that cover all situations - you're regularly going somewhere you've never been before, at short notice, in poor conditions.
The last airline pilot to join us told me that (despite continuous single-pilot GA throughout his career) that he'd never worked as hard as during one of our "normal" days - now step up to a busy day.
So think about the difference between airline ops (big support teams, known routes, scheduled ops, detailed compliance to ops manual) and fire-bombing (limited support, always new/unknown locations, always on-demand ops, ops manual that permits/expects crew to be pilots) - the bombers flying appallingly long days (day after day), knowing people will die and homes will burn if they don't get through, in conditions would routinely ground airline ops.
Maybe you could carefully select some airline crew, and train them into firebombing, but I guess it would take many
years for them to be up to speed and effective. That would be very expensive training. (And before some bright spark comments, no, there is no sim that replicates the stress and conditions of that kind of operation.)