Although the fires are on the other side of the Cascade mountain range, air quality around here the last few days has been pretty bad, and this morning after I got up, I briefly went looking for the source of the "smoke" I was smelling, before realizing where it was likely coming from
.
A couple years ago I was in Colorado working on the old family home when they had big fires - one ~60 miles north outside Colorado Springs, the other ~45 miles west at the Royal Gorge. With the normal wind pattern being from the west or northwest, air quality was
really bad...
One of the DC-10 tankers was being used against the Royal Gorge fire, operating out of the Pueblo Airport. The airport is ~5 miles due east of my house (when I was a teen, before they built up other houses around it, we could easily see the airport and watch the airport operations from our back windows). With the main runway pointed east/west, a westerly takeoff was almost directly at the Royal Gorge fire roughly 50 miles away. They weren't bothering to climb much after takeoff, going over the house at incredibly low altitudes (and really, really loud - and this was compared to my teen years of watching and listening to countless 727s go overhead when United did pilot training there). At one point, the guy that was doing tile work for me was out back cutting some tiles when the DC-10 taking off passed overhead. He came inside and pronounced he could tell me exactly how many rivets there were in the bottom of a DC-10 wing as he'd just counted them
.
I don't know how much those air-tanker pilots get paid, but they certainly earn it.
