DC10 tanker
 

Not sure if this is the right place but its a great shot of a DC10 firefighting

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXEete8_tPs

Great vid, nice to see them still doing useful work!

Oh well, here in the Netherlands they are still active as air-to-air refuellers...

Two in the Netherlands, 60 KC-10's in the U.S., still impressive as a fire fighter. Oh well.

In the video a smaller aircraft, not obviously a firefighter, comes over just ahead of the DC-10. Is it there to guide the DC-10, or for some other purpose?

It is called a lead plane, and is a standard component of air tanker firefighting practice here in the USA.

OldLurker,
Here in California they (CALFIRE, the State fire agency) use spotters, usually OV-10's.
They do a couple of runs to determine the optimum "pass" for the tanker(s), then lead them in.
I didn't get a good look at that spotter, but it looks like that is what it was doing.

You wouldn't want to confuse one for the other!:=

FedEx still has nearly 40 of them hauling stuff around. See them every day on approach and climb out from OAK.

The 747 is there also but I don't know if it has been called up yet.

https://mobile.twitter.com/FOX40/sta...0508373168128?

This one was close to our house last year. They were using CalFire heli's , Crane heli's, Superscoopers from Canada ,Dc 9's(or MD?) and also the Dc-10.
On this video you see what great flying they get to do, much better than following tracks over the ocean for 9 hours...

.youtube.com/watch?v=GHu2EnbR03A

Interesting - did they take that 747 over from Evergreen when they went bust or is it something they ginned up themselves? Last I'd heard Evergreen had run into some sort of issues with the firefighting conversion and hadn't certified the conversion (admittedly that was several years ago)...

Four years ago I was in Pueblo, CO doing some work on the old family house when they had the Royal Gorge fire. The house is just a few miles west of the airport and directly in line with the main runway (when I was a kid I used to sit out back and watch United 727s doing flight training touch and goes). Anyway, they were using the Pueblo airport as the base for a firefighting DC-10. The fire was only about 50 miles due west of the airport so they didn't bother to climb much after takeoff and they went over the house really low and loud. At one point the guy doing the tile work was outside cutting some tile when the DC-10 went over - he came in and announced he knew exactly how many rivets there were on a DC-10 wing because he'd been able to count them when it flew over :}

So low that I could see if they worked those Chapter 32 Service Bulletins.

tdracer The 747 Global Super Tanker being used in the fight against the California fires is a -400 that uses the tankage systems from the certified ex Evergreen -100. The Evergreen -100 aircraft was apparently deliberately destroyed when they went out of business.

The 747-400 has been very busy of late, along with 2 x DC-10, a host of RJ/146, 2 x MD87 and some old Neptune turboprops.

The first Supertanker, B.747-100, N479EV was scrapped at Marana on 12th July, 2017. The second Supertanker, B.747-400 was N492EV and is now N744ST.

Thanks surely not and Newforest2. As noted, last I heard was from several years back - Evergreen had been crowing about the success of the 747 water tanker then got suddenly very quiet when they ran into some unnamed issue and that was the last I'd heard.
Good to know it got updated to a 747-400 - that should keep it in the air far longer than a -100 (not to mention more payload/less fuel/less noise).
BTW, stopped at the Evergreen Aviation Museum in McMinnville when I went down to Oregon to view the Solar Eclipse a couple months back (I used to race against the Smith brothers back in the early 1980s so I knew Michael Smith). There is an old Evergreen 747F parked out in front (I didn't think to look at what model it was), and the Evergreen Waterpark next door has a 747-100 parked on the roof and integrated into the waterpark :cool:.

I often despair at how messed up our government can be at times:
Jumbo air tanker wins protest, may fight more US wildfires - news - att.net


So basically the U.S. Forest Service refused to let the 747 Supertanker fight wildfires because it dropped too much water/fire retardant during one of the worst fire seasons on record.
This is too stupid to make up :ugh: