AircraftNews.Com

Students of bush fires will know that various authorities claim the Australian Bush fires are as bad as any in the world and the Chauvinists would say they are without parallel. The season has now started and the ghoulish and gleeful but macabre voyeurs are on a countdown to another season of excellence or should it be infamy. It is now clear from the Royal Commission that there was severe mismanagement at very senior levels. This must include the State Government which bears ultimate responsibility. The current Victorian Government has been there for a long time and still seems to think that it can blame previous administrations. It used to be called the mirror government (I’ll look into it) and now seems more and more to be a righteous initiative free area which looks for a scapegoat when pressed and fines them massively while it continues the grand old tradition of Victorian State governments of either stripe, of infra structure inaction. Only the buzz words change: Fiscal responsibility , responsible leadership and so on. A recent little gem surfaced which would seem to bear a bit of closer examination. After a particularly bad summer a number of ultra large helicopters know locally as Elvises (after the name of the first to come to public awareness) have been engaged for fire fighting work. These are the Erickson S 64 (9500 kg of water) of US Military origins and have done a very good job. The first time they came in mass they did not have a lot of wok but subsequently have been veryvaluable. The need is hard to predict and it is a lot of money to spend if they are not needed but still what is the price of insurance? Until that year of disaster, requests for such capability had been steadfastly refused with the usual official smokescreen of reasons.
Even more recently another gem surfaced. During the 2009 prior to the Feb 7th Black Saturday disaster the Russian Government offered the Victorian Government the use of IL 76 very large water bombers (able to drop 11,000 gallons of water). They were turned down for reasons which range from garbage to plausible (Too long to arrange certification, not suitable for the mission, we have enough, time for transit too long etc).
The US fire fighting services have had the same offers and made the same response. Some critics of this decision are very scathing about the reasons. The US at least do have some very heavy metal available but the Vic Government has only Elvises and smaller.
American and some Australian experts have seen the Russian aircraft in action and are very impressed. They put the refusal of the Russian offer by the US Fire Authorities down to Politics. One of the reasons for refusal which seemed implausable was that the water could not be placed where it was needed. At the Kinglake fire this seems very unlikely.
There also seems to have been a lot of politics in the Australian situation. A sort of “don’t question us we are the experts” and “don’t get in the way we know what we are doing”. It would be very interesting to see a detailed account of why the Russian offer was refused and to compare the cost of the Russian offer with the over all cost of fire fighting. More fiddling while civilisation burns?