Great piccy, bet it took up some bandwidth.
I have a mate who drives firebombers(Trackers) in Canada during each summer.
I think you'll find that one reason they are deemed 'uneconomical'is we don't have the vast forests of valuable timber that they have in North America, just ozzy scub....and houses!
Why would we need 40 odd to cover Australia? I would have thought 6 or 10 would have been sufficient. How often do you have multiple fires in more than two States?, not often.
How often do fires rage out of control in NW Australia? Every year but there is nothing out there worth saving, and most of them are started deliberately by the National Parks people.
If you based say 3 in Sydney, 3 in Melbourne and 3 in Brisbane each summer you'd have 95% of the big fires out before they'd burned an acre down, let alone a suburb! No need to purchase them either, there are dozens of firebombers sitting idle in North America during the southern summer!
Perhaps the fire fighters are scared of being made redundant!
They, in my opinion, would just about do that provided they were used as per Canadian SOPs, i.e. as soon as a little fire is reported go and bomb it out ASAP. Unlike in the Southern 50 where they wait till it's out of control then launch everything they have at it!
Of course does anybody else remember the Trackers idle at Nowra years ago before being sold at rediculously knockdown prices? Complete with a mountain of spares? Might have made a good firebombing squadron instead of ending up as a Govt embarrassment! And we already owned them outright! F**KING POLITICIANS!!!!!
Chuck.