Trego's Mountain Ear

Watching the scoop planes climb from Dickey lake, turn south over the hayfield, and head out to dump water on the East Fork Fire got me thinking about the borate bombers of my youth – a time roughly running from kindergarten to age 40, from 1954 to 1989.  So I started a couple of search routines – and one article pretty much covers the subject.

“Operation Firestop, which ended in the fall of 1954, was responsible for aerial firefighting tools and techniques that, though they have evolved over decades, are still being used today. In the late 1950s, Consolidated PBY-5A amphibians followed the Avengers in the firefighting role, and they starred in Holly­wood’s take on the airtanker world, the 1989 film Always. The opening features a Catalina firebomber in one of the most memorable aviation movie intros ever shot. PBYs were slow, but they carried a substantial load, and their low-speed capability enhanced the accuracy of retardant drops.

PBYs pioneered the technique called scooping, in which a seaplane waterbomber rapidly force-fills its tanks while step-taxiing, thus obviating the need to land and refill from a ground supply.”

Firebombers! Flying on the Edge to Fight Fires

I was there for Always – it’s safe to say no firecamp ever matched the food quality Spielberg provided.  The Forest Supervisor insisted that he needed some experienced firefighters on hand as they built the set to use propane to simulate a forest fire . . . it was definitely realistic.  No other firecamp ever fed me a plate full of shrimp – and yellow shirts were popular.  Still, the movie wasn’t so much about fire as about flying.

Looking back at Air Tanker 127, a PB4Y-2 – Fire Aviation provides a bit of history of the PBY on fires – the PBY was the aircraft that brought my father into Naval Aviation during WWII, when he was the Warrant Boatswain on the seaplane tender Kenneth Whiting.

“Quite a few PB4Y-2s were converted into air tankers but their firefighting careers came to an end after the second in-flight major structural failure of Hawkins & Powers air tankers in 2002. The first was T-130, a C-130A working on the Cannon Fire near Walker, California on June 17, killing all three crew members after both wings folded upward and separated from the aircraft.

The second was T-123, a PB4Y-2 on the Big Elk Fire east of Estes Park, Colorado on July 18. From Wikipedia:

The aircraft, operating with the call sign Tanker 123, was loaded with 2,000 US gallons (7,600 L) of retardant. At the time of the accident, it was in a left turn to line up for its eighth drop of the day on the Big Elk fire. While still in the 15–20° left bank, witnesses on the ground and in another tanker observed the left wing separate from the aircraft and “fold upwards”, followed almost immediately by the initiation of a fire. The aircraft continued to roll left, impacting the ground at a 45° nose down attitude, starting a large fire at the wreck site. Both crewmen were killed in the crash.

After those two crashes and five fatalities, the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management commissioned a Blue Ribbon Panel to evaluate, “the airworthiness of aircraft that were operating outside of their original intended design”. After the report was released in March, 2003 the USFS and BLM  declined to renew the contracts on nine C-130A and PB4Y-2 airtankers. In a 2003 hearing before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, Larry Hamilton of the BLM testified, “The report also identified a lack of training in contemporary aviation management areas that has contributed to an unacceptable accident rate.”

There’s a lot of time and flying hours that occurred between World War II and 2002.  I hadn’t realized how much Naval Aviation lead into the borate bombers – the conversions of TBM torpedo bombers like those at Midway, the N3N biplanes, well – here’s the description from Firebombers:

“Soon after PBYs appeared as airtankers, another Con­solidated Navy bird joined them: the PB4Y-2 Privateer, a single-tail patrol bomber derivative of the B-24. Priva­teers were declared surplus in 1954, and a number of them were snatched up by firebombing operators. So began the warbird years of airtanking, with many military surplus bombers, fighter-bombers and freighters converted to fight fires. Among the earliest were a number of B-17s, 10 Grumman F7F Tigercats, three North American AJ Savages—tubby piston twins with an auxiliary Allison J33 jet engine—and even a few Northrop P-61 Black Widows.

Sixteen B-25s were also operating in California by 1960, but that July four crashed within a few days. The remaining Mitchells were forever banned from firebombing in that state. Douglas A-26/B-26s, however, were more successful. During the mid-1960s, there were nearly 60 Invaders opera­ting in California alone, though by 1970 most were gone—scrapped, sent to Canada or bought for restoration by warbirders.”

Check the links – the early days of development of any technology are always interesting – and moving aircraft from their World War II roles into forest fire roles is kind of a fun read.