Coulson Gets Around

Coulson Water Bomber in Australia - Jarrod Swanwick

Coulson is based in British Columbia, Canada. A C-130 Hercules has a range of about 2,000 miles. Australia is about 10,000 miles away, all over water, so I was wondering what route they took to get there. I mean there is more than one way to skin a cat (where did that expression come from anyway?), see this post and this video. I suppose they could have carried extra fuel in the cargo bay, but I don't know if they would have been able to carry enough to fly non-stop the whole way. 

Besides having a zillion aircraft photos, FlightAware also has flight logs for every aircraft in existence, so I thought I'd check. That log shows that this aircraft has been in Chile for at least the last month. So Coulson gets around.

Erickson Skycrane - Jarrod Swanwick

This photo was also in this weeks batch from FlightAware. Also from Australia by the same photographer. The Skycrane has appeared here a couple of times.

Wikipedia has a page about the Skycrane and the CH-54 Tarhe, the military version.

A Girl & Her Chopper

Ann Hansen and her Sikorsky Skycrane

Just because Skycranes have been here before, and so have flying girls.

Pic of the Day

1967 ERICKSON S64E Rotorcraft dropping during the Beaver creek fire in Blaine County Idaho summer 2013 with a firenado in the background - Loren Wood

Previous appearances of Skycrane here, here and here.

Aerial Firefighting, California

Conflux of pics crossed my screen, so I thought I'd share. Click to embiggenate.

A BAe-146 jet aerial tanker drops its load of fire retardant on a fire near Pollack Pines, Calif., Monday, Sept. 15, 2014. The fire, which started Sunday has consumed more than 3,000 acres and forced the evacuation of dozens of homes.(AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)

A firefighting helicopter makes a drop on a wildfire in Silverado Canyon in eastern Orange County, Calif. on Friday, Sept. 12, 2014. (AP Photo/Orange County Register, Mark Rightmire)

Dropping retardent over Weed, Ca. Via Posthip Scott.

Pic of the Day

A CH-54 Flying Crane helicopter transports an F-100 Super Sabre aircraft at Hill Air Force Base, Utah. Hill AFB is in Ogden, about 10 miles North of Salt Lake City. Ogden is on a flat piece of land trapped between The Great Salt Lake on the West and some big rocks to the East, as seen above.

Forest Fires

Forest Fire Season is in full swing. Scott sent me this clip taken from the cockpit of a water bomber as they are making a drop. See all those clouds along the left hand side? They aren't clouds, Bucky.
    Jack tried to drive to Missoula Montana this weekend but couldn't get through because of a fire. First the fire had closed the highway, then he needed gas and the fire had cut off the electric power to the nearby gas station, so getting gas meant backtracking 85 miles. He could have gotten through but it would have meant going 300 miles out his way.

He did get to see Goliath, the giant Sikorsky Skycrane, sucking up water out of a creek.

Looking around for more info I came across Global Incident Map dot com, which lets you choose from a dozen different kinds of disasters to plot for your amusement. Some of them only cover the USA while others are in fact Global. Here's a portion of the Forest Fire Map. As you can see, except for one in Eastern Canada, they are all in the West.

Every year we have a boat load of forest fires, and every year our fire fighting resources are strained to the limit. You can be pretty sure that forest fires have been happening all along and that our attempts to fight them is a recent development. I mean we weren't fighting them before we were here. Some fires might be started by humans, but most are started by lightning. We aren't helping matters by fighting fires. All that does is preserve fuel so the next fire can be even bigger. This seems like a fairly straight forward problem. Why are we continuing to have so much trouble with it? Congressman DeFazio from Southwestern Oregon has a few choice words in a story in The Coos Bay World.