The US Forest Service has refused to allow the 11,000-gallon Ilyushin 76TD Waterbomber plane into this country for fire fighting. It's a modern aircraft, a four-engine jet. It can cover an area the size of 12 football fields with one 10-second drop (of liquid - water or retardant). It puts a fireline down 300 feet wide and 3,900 feet long in 10 seconds. It could have saved every community in Oregon, Colorado and Arizona this year.

Two years ago during the Cerro Grande fire near Los Alamos, two planes were sitting on the runway in Moscow, fully crewed, each plane having three eight-man crews, ready to take off. They only asked for the cost of fuel and food and lodging for the crews. They had been requested by FEMA, but at the last minute, FEMA told them they weren't needed. The Associated Press reported that then-District IX FEMA director Buddy Young went to the fire and publicly announced,

"You will not bring the Russian planes in here: We're not having any Russians coming here and fighting our fires."

a 180,000-ton behemoth that can haul 11,000 gallons of liquid to a fire, nearly four times the carrying capacity of the C-130 Hercules, the largest tanker used by the Forest Service. Robinson sees the IL-76 as a much-needed strategic weapon for the nation's firefighting arsenal. He is convinced that had it been called in when the Rodeo, Hayman and Biscuit fires began raging out of control, they would have been squelched before they became mega-blazes. "Frankly, I'm outraged," says Robinson, "because I've flown on missions on this plane - I know how good it is. This plane is ten times bigger than the average tanker they're using in Arizona and Colorado and Oregon, and because it's so heavy it can fly in windy conditions where smaller planes would be grounded." Designed in the early 1970s for military transport, the IL-76 has been used extensively throughout the world by different countries as a cargo carrier. In order to fly firefighting missions, it is retrofitted with two aluminum tubes, each one 90-feet long, four-feet in diameter, and capable of holding 5,500 gallons of water - a total of 11,000 gallons. It's so effective the Russians don't use fire retardant in it. Robinson hopes that this year - with more landscapes than ever blackened by fire - the Forest Service will break its long-standing opposition and agree at least to test the aircraft. But the Forest

Service is adept at deflating any interest a politician or member of the public might show in the Waterbomber. "We are not interested in buying or using the IL-76 ," Forest Service spokesman Joe Walsh told the Colorado Springs Gazette in June at the height of the Hayman fire. "We don't have any need for it."

Robinson had flown on a Waterbomber mission in 1999 when Greece was enduring its worst wildfires in over a century and winds were so fierce the air tankers of the Greek Air Force were grounded. As he tells it: "There were two 3,000-foot-wide fires that were going unabated because of windy conditions through the mountains. CNN was there and said it was unstoppable. But we filled up at the Greek Air Force base, then went to the first fire, opened the doors on the tanks - and whoosh - 10 seconds later we looked back

and that 3,000 feet of fire was gone, absolutely gone. That took care of the first fire. The pilot returned to the base, the tanks were refilled, and they went to the second fire and put that one out just as quickly. These fires had burned for a week, with hundreds of firefighters and all kinds of equipment brought in from Germany and other countries. The Greek media called it a miracle." James Harrison is a battalion chief with the Santa Barbara County Fire Dept. in southern California. He became aware of the IL-76 a couple of years ago when a group of Russians came to the United States at the invitation of the US State Department for a week-long session of disaster-preparedness workshops. There, Harrison met the man who developed

the IL-76 Waterbomber and saw a four-minute video clip of the plane taking off and making water drops. Harrison followed through by reading all the articles he could find about the Waterbomber.Would he find that useful as a fire professional? "Absolutely," he exclaimed, "We should at least give them a chance. I know the Forest Service disagrees with me, and I disagree with them, but I don't understand why there's anything other than a political reason that we wouldn't at least bring that plane over here and try it."

This artical was apparently posted to Yahoo space-modelers_eva group by "Bruce P." <spacecraftengr@y...>

Return to Sacred Earth Website