Caldor Fire: Water Bombers, Helos, Pathfiders, Oh My! 9/9

[LesterBoffo]

So, Just wanted to post a event that I'd like to host. Set in the Sierras near South Lake Tahoe at KTVL for next Thursday the 9th of September at 18:00 UTC for a roughly organized wildfire control flight even t using several aircraft we have from FG's hangar and a couple from my own.

Scheduled for September 9 at approximately 18:00 UTC It would be good to download FG's terrasynch scenery for this event if you don't have California's scenery. The option to spawn on the lake near KTVL would be easily done for the CL415 and Catalina. There's also WillBragg's lovely Erikson SkyCrane, and I have a none GPL version of the MS2004 Martin Mars Water bomber. I'm not sure if there's specific fire retardant versions of the Boeing 737 or other big airliner conversions in FG...?

link to InciWeb's Caldor Fire map and webpage https://inciweb.nwcg.gov/incident/maps/7801/

If you been aware of the devastating wildfires raking the western flanks of California's Sierras this late summer. One of the biggest is the Caldor Wildfire it has grown to include over 130K acres burned and has just recently jumped the granite crest of the Sierras and is running Eastward downhill towards South Lake Tahoe. We need a lot of water bomber pilots for various aircraft operation crews and a person who would like to ATC the operation?

What would be the consensus for this?

[wlbragg]

Hi LesterBoffo,

Someone could also run a fast, light, civil aviation twin as a pathfinder for the heavies. There's also big airliners as retardant droppers.

During a big fire in Temecula CA a few years back they escorted the heavy bomber with a small jet of some kind. Was awesome to watch.

I've recently done an update on Helijah's Canadair Water Bomber CL415

Did that upgrade ever find its way back to fgaddons or Helijah's hanger?

Anyone know what "big airliners" we happen to have in fgaddon that are typically used for water bombers? LesterBoffo, you really sparked my enthusiasm to make variants out of a few of the best of them for forestry duty.

[LesterBoffo]

Hi LesterBoffo,

Someone could also run a fast, light, civil aviation twin as a pathfinder for the heavies. There's also big airliners as retardant droppers.

During a big fire in Temecula CA a few years back they escorted the heavy bomber with a small jet of some kind. Was awesome to watch.

I've recently done an update on Helijah's Canadair Water Bomber CL415

Did that upgrade ever find its way back to fgaddons or Helijah's hanger?

Anyone know what "big airliners" we happen to have in fgaddon that are typically used for water bombers? LesterBoffo, you really sparked my enthusiasm to make variants out of a few of the best of them for forestry duty.

Hi Will The CL415 Bomber never made it back to Helijah or the Add-ons because I made it into a JSBsim FM and Helijah doesn't accept his planes being converted to JSBsim. I saw at the time, (about 2014) no way around this, so I'm just maintaining it in my own hangar repo. I also have a Creative commons model and graphic converted from MS2004 of the Martin Mars in Clarkson Fire Bomber's livery. It is YASim and flies fairly realistically. But you have to manually load the "cargo weight" with the slider in Menu.

[LesterBoffo]

Also a link to the Western Sierra near Placerville's airport, The cal Fire/Forest service appear to be running big CH47 transport helicopters out of Placerville along with Bell AH-1G Cobras. There's lot of rotary winged aircraft involved in this fire.

https://www.flightradar24.com/N473CH/29046a65

Edited: There's also a Fairchild Swearingen Metroliner, I suppose is also for CalFire as a pathfinder or doing IR data sweeps over the fire, it's running loops over the fire lines. Also an OV10 in CalFire forest service livery running a patrol.

[LesterBoffo]

Link to FG OV10 with CalFire livery https://wiki.flightgear.org/North_American_OV-10A_Bronco

[wlbragg]

The CL415 Bomber never made it back to Helijah or the Add-ons because I made it into a JSBsim FM and Helijah doesn't accept his planes being converted to JSBsim. I saw at the time, (about 2014) no way around this, so I'm just maintaining it in my own hangar repo.

Is your repo public?

If it is a jsbsim variant, would you like it in fgaddon as a variant? I would be happy to add it if it qualifies licensing.

[LesterBoffo]

The CL415 Bomber never made it back to Helijah or the Add-ons because I made it into a JSBsim FM and Helijah doesn't accept his planes being converted to JSBsim. I saw at the time, (about 2014) no way around this, so I'm just maintaining it in my own hangar repo.

Is your repo public?

If it is a jsbsim variant, would you like it in fgaddon as a variant? I would be happy to add it if it qualifies licensing.

My main concern was bothering Helijah about it's FDM, The repo is in Mediafire I'm not sure it's FG approved "public" https://www.mediafire.com/file/5sumb2q34ko9bjx/Canadair_CL415.zip/file

[LesterBoffo]

Also before everyone goes loading up KTVL The latest version scenery of this airport has severely borked terrain that is interfering with the runways and taxi/parking. Much like Half Moon Bay of a few years ago. Nearby KMEV and more westerly Placerville airport KPVF are better choices for small to medium sized aircraft.

[Delta5142]

Hi all,
I know the MD-80 is a tanker right now. I always see them flying over my house at extremely low altitudes since we're close to the fire here in the Sacramento area. They take off from Sacramento's McClellan Airport, which is northwest of the city. Here is a picture of them:


I know Josh is in active development of an MD-80, someone can make an erickson aero tanker livery and fly around with that.

The 747 Supertanker was also in use last year near me to fight the other fires that were around then, however that program stopped a couple months ago.

Kind Regards,
Delta

[LesterBoffo]

This list covers most of the aircraft I observed on FlightRadar24's online map.

Types Of Fixed-Wing Aircraft and Helicopters in service with CDF:

Grumman S-2T
B Ae-146
OV 10A "Bronco"
Beechcraft King Air 200
AH-1 Firewatch "Cobra"
DC-10
Sikorsky S-61
Sikorsky S-64 "Skycrane"
Sikorsky S-70 "Firehawk"
Eurocopter AS332L "Super Puma"
Boeing-Vertol 107 "Vertol"
Boeing 234 "Chinook"
Kaman "K-Max"
Bell 212
UH-1H "Super Huey"
Bell 205 A++
Lockheed C-130
UH-60 "Blackhawk"
Boeing CH-46 "Sea Knight"
CH-47 "Chinook"
737-300
747-400
MD-87

There were also private owner aircraft likes Coulsen USA's Fairchild Metroliner, Rockwell 500, Aerospatial AS123 Squirrels. and SH-3 Sea Kings.

[wlbragg]

I looked up some history on tankers and started gathering up the different aircraft to add to my aerial firefighting hanger. The history I was referencing matched your list pretty well.
Because of the amount of aircraft used historically for aerial firefighting, most of which we have available to FlightGear, I decided to make another addon (or I may add it to wildfire) that will allow you to quickly setup any aircraft with the capability of using it as a aerial tanker. About the only thing you will have to actually add is the "weight" tag (loadpoint) in the fdm, unless I can figure out a way to do it procedurally. Everything else I hope to have the addon handle. Everything, like the effects, the trigger tie to wildfire, submodels, position of the retardant drop, etc. Design and functionally, it will be similar to the the way I made the cargo towing addon to easily be adapted to any aircraft. You will be able to adjust the parameters of the retardant reservoir, drop point, volume, etc., with a GUI. We'll see how far I actually go with it.

[Johan G]

Some posts about adding "Bumbi Buckets" used by helicopters to the cargo towing add-on were moved to the topic Cargo Towing Addon.

Sorry for derailing the topic about the event.

[Johan G]

Will show up in the FGUK MD500E and try out the (smaller) bambi bucket of the wlbragg's cargo towing addon

I have added the MD500E with these lines in Cargo-Towing-Addon/Aircraft.xml (if using coordinates from the FDM, the cable turns up neatly coiled on the cockpit floor ):

Code: Select all

    <aircraft n="31">
        <!-- weight x="0.5" y="0" z="1.2" mass-prop="/sim/weight[1]/weight-lb"/ -->
        <name type="string">500e</name>
        <x-pos type="double">1.75</x-pos>
        <y-pos type="double">0.0</y-pos>
        <z-pos type="double">0.325</z-pos>
        <offset type="double">3.75</offset>
        <diameter type="double">0.75</diameter>
        <wincharm type="int">0</wincharm>
        <loadpoint type="int">1</loadpoint>
    </aircraft>


[Johan G]

Some more posts were moved to the topic Cargo Towing Addon.

[TheEagle]

Oof, such a pity I missed this ! Can't we do something similar another time ?