Reece

Aviation, as always, played an important part in fighting those fires, particularly in the high value populated areas in and nearthe Sydney metropolitan area. Our unreserved and respect goes out to all those brave and highly competent aircrew who day after day manoeuvred their helos into the very bowels of the worst of the fires in a desperate attempt to save property and life. We live in hope that perhaps some of the regionalised anti aviation groups at least recognise just how important, useful and people friendly aviation, and in particular, helicopters can be when it comes to national disasters and saving lives. We live in hope.

More importantly though there are existing elements of aviation that can do much more than was available from January’s rudimentary efforts to quell what amounted to an inferno. They are fire bombers. They are not new and quite a few other countries have invested heavily in them in an effort to slay the same enemy of fire as we ourselves suffer so dearly from every few summers.

The civil authorities of France, Spain, Italy and Canada all operate large fire fighting capable helicopter fleets in addition to specialist mission aircraft in the form of types such as the highly reputed Canadair fire bombers. The latest mark of this aircraft, the CL-415, can perform nine missions 11km distant from a lake to the fire scene delivering 55,000 litres of fire suppressant per hour in the process. Though eastern Australia is less well endowed with viable air capable lakes than where most of these aircraft normally base from, we still have large tracts of water close enough to the fire zones to make the use of such aircraft a realistic option.

Of more interest though is that whilst the at which these aircraft reside are awash with snow. Is there perhaps a synergy for forming a federally funded and operated bureau which leases a number of these assets for southern summer? From early November till late April these aircraft could operate in Australia. Their ferry costs and training missions Down Underwould also serve to enhance their overall operational capability on their return to their home base. Surely this would not be such an expensive operation while the basing of eight or nine such aircraft on the eastern seaboard would have to be considered a national asset.

After all, 25 years ago if you had suggested that our major beaches would be patrolled by highly equipped specialist mission helos you would have been laughed off the sand. Do we have to await the second decade of the next century to figure out that aerial fire bombing isn’t such a bad idea! Whilst ferrying in otherwise dormant fire bombers is a practical solution to the problem there is even a better approach that uses existing resources at minimal real cost.

And that is to better use the tremendous inherent capability of our Defence forces. Elements of the ADF worked long and hard during the recent crisis though they could have been so much more effective if only they had been given some better tools with which to work.

Let’s turn back the clock to 1982 and Project Aquarius.

Aquarius was a programme to examine the value of fitting an RAAF C-130H Hercules with an in-use US developed heavy fire bombing capability. The test ran for two seasons and during the terrible Ash Wednesday fires of February 1983 the Aquarius Herc flew a total of 131 operational hours in what was termed Operation Quench. Whilst the system was proven to be effective the verdict at the end of the day was clouded by competing bureaucracies which seemed to indicate that lack of funding would preclude its widespread use on a more permanent basis. So, due to a lack of dollars, the baby was once more thrown out with the bath water! The system used in Aquarius was the proven US MAFFS (Modular Airborne Fire Fighting System) unit which simply pallet rolls into and out of the Here. It takes about two hours to configure a regular Here as a fully fledged fire bomber and the MAFFS units can be easily stored at existing ADF bases as required. In the US, six Air National Guard MAFFS equipped Hercules are available to assist during the fire season while their crews are proficient with the fire bombing mission and perform renewal training prior to each summer.

Now this is real lateral thinking but why not lease three or four of these MAFFS units from the US whilst they aren’t needing them and hold them in store for an eventuality like what happened this summer? Two crews for each aircraft can be trained in the fire bombing mission and each Spring brought up to speed with practice missions performed in conjunction with the appropriate ground based fire fighters.

As36 Squadroncrews are already highly proficient with low level tactical flying in hostile terrain it shouldn’t be too difficult a job to bring them up to speed in the real time fire bombing role. The use of the modern C-130H simulator at Richmond can also be used to advantage to perfect operational bombing techniques at minimum expense. Notas ma- choasthereal money burning thing but performed day in day out by the world’s airlines for bringing their crews up to speed with everything from landing in a monsoon at Hong Kong to a snowstorm at Cleveland.

The extra funding required to conduct this training (and subsequent operational deployment when disaster inevitably strikes) could come direct from consolidated revenue and thus not burden an already tightly honed Defence budget.

Imagine what three or four MAFFS equipped Hercs, each capable of delivering around 14,000 litres of retardant (twice as effective as straight water) would have done to assist ground based fire fighters in the recent fires! Another asset that is also wasted is the S-70 Black Hawk/ Seahawk helicopter force. These highly capable medium lift helos can tote the largest existing monsoon buckets with ease and are in abundance (51) with highly trained crews used to operating in the extremes that bushfires produce. Perhaps an Australian designed and made large capacity rectangular bucket could fully utilise the uplift capability of the S-70s? Existing small buckets (about 500 litres for a JetRanger or Squirrel) go nowhere near utilising this capability due to their relatively small size. As most fires are not that far from dams, lakes and rivers then imagine what a single S-70 could achieve with a 3000 litre bucket? Imagine what a dozen of them would do? Is this all too hard to visualise, is it all too expensive – we most definitely think not. We have an excellent existing resource to help combat this most destructive of our natural enemies, let’s get on with using it and hopefully, just hopefully, we can ensure that next time we are somewhat better equipped to be able to deal with this most destructive of natural disasters.