NSW burns but where is the 737?
 

Not quite.... It cannot carry firefighters from A to B. It can only carry the water and retardant and essential crew (eg pilots loadmaster etc). No pax.

Big difference. The red tape of which you speak prevents the aircraft which probably does not meet passenger certification requirements due to the nature of its modifications from carrying what would be non essential pax.

When minutes count, CASA take months...

I have read that CASA want flight attendants on board due to the number of passengers being carried. Can only assume under the N rego this was not an issue.

A lot of firies have been chartered on regional flights in the past months. Great for getting them closer to some of the fires. So in the end, probably better to let the 737 continue bombing instead of paxing.

As it is for approved pax ops here, Havick, in big jets, what's more! :eek: :sad: :ouch:

"On the ground" or "can't carry pax"?

Would the B747 Air Tanker assist, why not bring it to Aussie?
 

Surely the B747 air tanker would make a worthwhile addition to the fire fighting effort.
Is there an existing Operator that would host the operator and assist with any CASA issues?.

(VERY offtop)

I'm a huge fan of finding non-passenger/cargo use for old airplanes, but... They seriously named it the Large Air Tanker? It's literally the SMALLEST jet-powered firebomber in the world!!! By that logic, Il-76 would be the Giant Air Tanker, the DC-10 fire bomber would be the DC-10 Humongous Air Tanker, and Boeing 747 Supertanker would be the Boeing 747 Big-Ay Air Tanker. Or maybe just call it the Compared-to-what Air Tanker?

And an on-topic.
It's NEVER unfair to blame CASA even if, in this particular case, they aren't really doing anything blame-worthy... Or are they?

The 737 has been flying just about every day all day long dropping retardant. People that are all bent out of shape that it isn’t carrying passengers don’t realize that you would have to remove it from the retardant dropping missions in order to transport passengers and it is much easier to use standard commercial transports instead. Right now Oz has the DC-10, the 737, a couple of C-130s, and an RJ that are flying retardant and removing the 737 from that role would have a large impact on the amount of retardant being dropped.

The pax outcry is based on either incomplete information or a lack of understanding of the process to get the 737 approved for passenger transport. When the airplane got its FAA certification, it included a 72 passenger standard interior. The contract that NSW has with the operator doesn’t include cabin personnel so that is something that will have to be sorted before CASA will issue a passenger carrying certificate. It’s only a question of time.

Ironically, this is just a huge beat up.

​​​​

Not sure there is more than one. Sounds also like its very expensive to maintain.

It's certainly around. I was up near Forster when their fires were out of control,

I saw it overhead more than once, as well as the RJ85.

For the lazy person asking where it is https://www.flightradar24.com/N138CG/23171cdc

its bird dog

https://www.flightradar24.com/BDOG376/2317050f



C-130
https://www.flightradar24.com/C130/23171a7a

Busy in the America's. We've offered heavy air tankers from Canada and USA but no takers. These aircraft are now surrounded by snow..

What rubbish, we took a VLAT as soon as it’s available in the form of a DC10 that has been working daily since it got here. Taking any more is not practical as we don’t have the crews or craft to support a larger fleet. With the herc, Avros and the 737 and DC10 it’s a capable fleet (including the seven Vlats/lats, upped from 5 originally
Not rubbish my friend. The aircraft come with crews by the way. The DC-10 air tanker had been booked. I can tell you that a couple of other air tanker companies in Canada and the US have offered 146/L188/CL215 air tankers that are ready now.

Queensland has no large tankers at all!

I was under the impression that the States hired/bought the aerial assets and the NAFC co-ordinated their use.

So we are being told that there are more larger fire fighting aircraft available from Canada and USA, but we don't need them?
Judging from the aircraft mentioned in the above post,we are talking about offers from Airspray and Conair who have successfully worked in Australia over many years.

All this when a senior NSW Govt Minister admits that they had been warned about the problems we now have and our woefully under resourced RFS/NPWF and NSWF&R are totally overwhelmed by the current workload.Government seems to have no short term solution to handle a predominately volunteer fire fighting force who on top of fighting fires has to still carry our their day jobs to put food on the table.

Compare this to CAL Fire who have 13 pre prepared airbases, 23 S2Ts and 14 Broncos that they own and numerous other aircraft on hire. We let our fleet of Trackers rot away in Sale until they were scrapped 20 years later.

Cal Fire also have just obtained 7 x C130s for conversion. What did we do with our C130Hs? We gave them away to the Indonesians.
We also sold off our Orions which also seem to make a pretty good fire fighting aircraft.

I suppose that we deserve the Government that we have who seem to know the cost of everything but the value of nothing , but I'm not sure that my grandchildren did anything to deserve this ?

Wunwing

Clearly, it's a value judgement, but I would argue that in the case of the RFS it is a case of too much money thrown their way and not enough oversight of what they spend it on.
No politician ever wants to say no to 'our brave firefighters'; thus over the years the NSW RFS has become top-heavy with a bunch of Sydney good ol' boys, whose main interest is empire-building. The rural volunteers who actually fight fires are second class citizens to the Capos from Homebush.


What, you think they're racing home from work, get changed and go out and fight fires all night, then go back to work? That's not how it generally works.


Not to mention the Lancaster and Halifaxes our governments thoughtlessly scrapped. And think what we could do with a B29! Did you read the article quoted above on the true value of VLATs?
They certainly make good TV though.

I am not saying that the Trackers would be what we would convert today but unless Conair, Civile and Securite and Calfire have been wasting their money and time with them over the last 40 years they seem to have been a good platform.

As far as volunteers coming off the fire front and then working, that seems to be the story that I'm hearing from my locals. How else do you run your business when you have contract and job obligations? The bank doesn't just cancel your mortgage for the fire season?
Wunwing

I think there is a perception that bushfires can be 'bombed' into submission (reverse firebombing!)

VLATs are undoubtedly useful but IMHO vastly oversold for politics (RFS/Government) and profits (some people make a LOT of money out of this, and not just the pilots/owners).

As for the volunteers continuing working their day jobs whilst firefighting at night; not in my experience, your locals may be different.

Most volunteers that I know are "tradies". Their contracts don't just go away because they are volunteering. Same with the farmers. Cows still have to be looked after.It must be particularly galling when the NSWF&R and NP firies and the RFS white shirted supervisors are being paid and you have to go home and earn money.

As far as the large air tankers are concerned, it seems they are particularly good at knocking down fires to a manageable situation in the early stages. At least that how it works outside Australia. As I said in an earlier post, US,,Canada and Europe seems to see it that way and have for over 50 years. I watched the disastrous Springwood fire in its earlier stage from my parents village. The RFS never even had a chance with vehicles as the single road soon turned to gridlock, as did the Great Western Highway. The helicopter attack that day never even touched the sides. However having later watched the DC10 at the Maddon's Plain fire, its obvious to me that a couple of DC10s would have stopped the early Springwood fire in it's tracks, at least to a level that the ground attack would have been successful when they eventually managed to get there.

Maybe if we had converted our Neptunes in the 60s we would have a better working understanding of how to use them large aircraft now?
As far as our Lancasters and Halifaxes, I think that you will find that Australia never owned any in the first place.

Wunwing.

Thee RFS trucks don't appear to have the personal protection systems that Victorian ones have, but apart from that, they seem to get a lot of work out of their trucks.. As far as I can tell, which is not much, the fire response in NSW has been managed very well. The NSW Government could perhaps throw quite a few million at new vehicles and facilities.

My main beef is that we need to adopt aboriginal burning practices and refrain from putting out "natural" fires in wilderness areas caused by lightening strikes because otherwise the fuel load builds up to the point where any fire is catastrophic. As a rule of thumb, all of it needs to be burned every five years or less to return the forests to the park - like state they were in at first settlement. This is a matter for Government policy, not the fire services.

To put that another way, the fuel load on the forest floor is going to burn sometime. You can have a holocaust of a fire every twenty years or a cool burn every five - your choice.

However all the above is personal opinion.

Older ones don't, newer ones do. Service life for a firefighting appliance (not just RFS tankers, FRNSW urban appliances too) is about 20 years, so you'll see a mix equipment levels depending on the age of the vehicle.

That approach was precisely how we ended up with situations like Canberra in January 2003. That's also why nowadays they knock those down fires hard and early, using attack aircraft and RAFT teams.

It's got nothing to do with government policy, or "greenies" or any other such nonsense. Climate is getting hotter and dryer. The number of opportunities to conduct hazard reduction burns safely are growing fewer every year, and the manpower available to conduct those burns is also very finite. A lot of these places are also simply not accessible.

I've done just that. Knocked off work at 5pm, jumped in the RFS tanker at 7pm and driven towards Sydney. Got to Springwood around midnight, and went into property protection until around 7am. I didn't go straight back to work though, I kept at it for 14 hours a day for the next four days, before being relieved by another crew.

The average volunteer has a job and a family. Their annual leave will run out eventually, and while they're protected against reprisals from their employer for going off to fight fires, they don't get paid when their leave runs out. Strangely enough, the kids still want to eat and the bank still wants their mortgage payments every month whether there are bushfires or not.