Air Tankers in Oz

 The Australian fire season is growing longer and more intense. Raging bushfires have challenged Australia’s state and local firefighting agencies, sometimes overwhelming resources and leading to disastrous results.

In early December 2014, Australian first responders in the southern State of Victoria added two powerful aerial firefighting tools to their arsenal, when two Canadian air tankers arrived at Avalon Airport near Melbourne.

Coulson Aviation’s Lockheed C-130Q/H (Tanker #131) and Conair Group’s Avro RJ85 (Tanker #162) have been contracted by Australia’s National Aerial Firefighting Centre (NAFC), and are under the operational direction of the State of Victoria’s Aviation Services Unit (ASU).

The aircraft have been hired for a minimum of 12 weeks, with the contract commencing on Dec. 16, 2014. They were put to work immediately.

“The season started off very busy right up to the end of the first week of January–then a cooler weather pattern, with some rain, moved into Southeastern Australia,” said Stephen Holding, business manager at Field Air, Conair’s partner in Australia. “The hot weather returned in early February, and the tankers were dispatched 1,700 miles across the country to fight fires in Western Australia.”

The RJ85 and C-130Q/H have been dispatched in tandem from the Avalon tanker base (between Melbourne and Geelong); from Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) Edinburgh in Adelaide, South Australia; and from RAAF Pearce north of Perth, Western Australia.

“The RJ85 (and C-130Q/H) have fought fires in all terrains, including heavily forested mountain country, scrubland, grassland and hilly areas around Adelaide, close to the urban interface,” added Holding.

Britton Coulson, general manager of Coulson Aircrane, explained that the NAFC is the contracting agency for both the air tankers and the company’s Sikorsky S-61s.

“NAFC of Australia is equivalent to the U.S. Forest Service (USFS), and the assets are federally contracted, but mostly funded by and based in Victoria State. If another state wanted to use them, they could. NAFC has been working on these large tanker contracts for a number of years, but I believe they wanted to trial aircraft that had been proven, rather than research and development projects,” added Coulson.

By all accounts, the large air tankers have been doing a good job. At the time of writing in mid-February, they had been dispatched in tandem and had made 81 drops, hitting the milestone of one million litres of retardant dropped while deployed in Western Australia.

The C-130Q/H and the RJ85 are both in Australia on single-year trial contracts that can be extended for several seasons. The new Australian contracts are major milestones for both Coulson and Conair, which also won contracts for these firefighting aircraft from the USFS in 2013.

In both cases, the national firefighting agencies rebalanced their firefighting aircraft fleets to include new generation large tankers.

“A balanced fleet has the correct mix of aircraft and capabilities to provide quick, aggressive initial attack on fires,” explained Jeff L. Berry, manager of business development at Conair. “You need to have the capability to support containment efforts in conjunction with ground resources, until the fire is contained.”

The Australian fire season can be ferocious, as demonstrated by Victoria’s Black Saturday fires of Feb. 7, 2009, which killed 173 people, injured 400 and saw more than 3,000 structures destroyed–representing Australia’s highest fire losses in recent history.

Australia has a long history of using aircraft to fight forest fires.

In the early 1980s, the State of Victoria evaluated an RAAF Lockheed C-130Q/H equipped with an Aero Union MAFFS (Modular Airborne Firefighting System) for two seasons, followed in 1983-1984 by Conair Aviation’s tanker No. 450 from Canada, a four-engine Douglas DC-6B equipped with an 11,356-litre tank flown by experienced fire crews.

Over the last 40 years, most firefighting bases in Australia have been populated with single-engine air tankers (SEAT) and light and medium helicopters equipped with buckets or belly tanks.

In July 2003, NAFC was established by participating Australian states and territories to share additional expensive, highly specialized aerial firefighting assets after a series of costly and devastating fires the previous season.

The first NAFC fleet totaled 16 aircraft in 2004-2005. The following year, the fleet had grown to 24 and included two Coulson Aircrane Sikorsky S-61Ns contracted from Canada. Since then, the national fleet has steadily increased.

In addition to the C-130Q/H and RJ85, the NAFC is contracting 54 fixed-wing aircraft and 44 helicopters this season, for water bombing and bucketing, reconnaissance and air attack supervision missions.

Single-engine air tankers (SEAT) remain the backbone of the Australian bomber fleet, with 40 on contract this season, including 38 Air Tractor AT-802s with 800 U.S. gallon (3,028 litre) tanks, and two turbine PZL M18 Dromaders.

The NAFC helicopter fleet comprises 23 medium and heavy aircraft used for a wide variety of roles, including initial attack. The fleet includes three Bell 412SPs, 12 Bell 214B-1s, two Coulson Aircrane Sikorsky S-61Ns and six Erickson S-64 Aircranes with 2,650-gallon (10,000-litre) tanks.

The three Bell 412SPs, outfitted with hoists and belly tanks, are flown by Wildcat Helicopters of Kelowna, B.C., during the Canadian fire season. Other Canadian helicopter operators with aircraft on seasonal firefighting contracts in Australia include Valhalla Helicopters of Kelowna and East-West Helicopters of Salmon Arm, B.C.

Each of the main Australian “fire” states also has a “Call When Needed” system for calling up additional bombers and helicopters based on the fire threat level. These aircraft are drawn from a roster of 500 aircraft already assigned firefighting call signs.

In 2005-2006, Coulson Aircrane made inroads into the Southern Hemisphere when it won an NAFC contract to base two Sikorsky S-61Ns in the State of Victoria, to transport up to 17 initial attack fire crews and drop 924 U.S. gallons (3,500 litres) of water on hot spots.

Now in its ninth year, the Coulson S-61Ns are based in Colac and Mansfield, Victoria, for 90 days from mid-December to mid-March. They travel back and forth to Australia on roll-on/roll-off freighters.

In 2007, the Coulson Group entered the fixed-wing aerial firefighting business when it purchased the world-renowned Martin Mars Flying Tankers waterbomber operation, based at Sproat Lake in Port Alberni, B.C.

Coulson expanded the geographic scope of Mars operations between 2007 and 2013 to battle wildfires in California, Mexico and Alberta. In 2011, it purchased a former NASA C-130Q/H to bid on the USFS’s next gen air tanker requirement.

“We are continuing to enhance our next gen C-130Q/H air tanker by increasing the tank capacity and developing new GPS-based touch screen tank control technology that will ensure our state-of-the-art aircraft stays ahead of the pack,” said Britton Coulson.

In 2014, Coulson secured a Lockheed L-100-30 (L-382G) from Lynden Air Cargo in Alaska, to convert into its second Hercules tanker. The aircraft is currently being modified by ST Aerospace in Singapore, and will enter service in the spring of 2015 with a larger capacity 4,330 U.S. gallon (16,390 litre) RADS-XXL tank.

The USFS is expected to have a “Next Generation II” tender in 2015 to bolster its fleet of heavy air tankers. The civil-certified L-100-30 also provides Coulson with an aircraft to re-enter the Canadian market, following British Columbia’s termination of a seasonal contract for Hawaii Mars in 2013.

“We have been in discussions with multiple countries on tanking their Lockheed C-130 fleets to support the firefighting mission,” added Coulson. “With over 2,000 C-130s in operation, there is a lot of potential business.”

The USFS is currently in the market for seven tanks to install in seven former U.S. Coast Guard Lockheed HC-130H aircraft, which are being refurbished by the U.S. Air Force.

“Our tanking system does not introduce any restrictions into the C-130 airframe. The tank can be removed in less than two hours, and once the OEM Lockheed floorboards go back down, the Hercules is capable of doing any mission required. The flight crew doesn’t even know it’s there,” added Coulson.

The Conair Group first started fighting forest fires in Australia in the early 1980s, after it developed a 300 U.S. gallon belly tank for Bell 205A-1 and 212 helicopters operated by Frontier Helicopters, a subsidiary.

Through the 1980s, Conair’s helicopters migrated between the Northern and Southern hemispheres, and there were ongoing efforts by the company to interest Australian authorities in the various fixed-wing air tankers it developed in the 1980s and 1990s.

Conair considered developing a jet air tanker in the 1990s based on the Boeing 737-200, but the idea was well ahead of its time.

The jet concept received a new set of wings in 2011, when the USFS announced plans to contract next gen 3,000 U.S. gallon air tankers that were civil certified and turbine engined.

The design and construction of the Conair Avro RJ85 air tanker involved over 30,000 hours of non-recurring OEM engineering support by BAE Systems of Prestwick, Scotland. About 54,000 hours were contributed by Conair engineering professionals in Abbotsford, along with aerospace technicians from five major contributing vendors. “No other ‘next generation’ air tanker available today has received that level of original equipment manufacturer (OEM) support,” said Berry of Conair.

The first two RJ85s entered service with Aero-Flite Inc. in the U.S. in 2014, on five-year contracts with the USFS.

The third conversion, Tanker 162, saw some service as a spare aircraft in the U.S. and did some demonstration flying in British Columbia during the 2014 fire season, before deploying to Australia in early December.

“We are extremely happy with the performance and serviceability of the RJ85 air tanker,” Berry told Skies. “The aircraft and advanced retardant delivery system have exceeded expectations, and are a positive endorsement of the commitment Conair made to develop this air tanker. Feedback from wildfire agencies and our aircrew has also been very positive.”

With a maximum takeoff weight of 97,000 pounds, the RJ85 carries up to 3,000 U.S. gallons (11,355 litres) of retardant in an external tank and can cruise at over 400 knots, which placed most of Victoria’s fire hot spots within 30 minutes of the Avalon tanker base.

Conair selected an external tank as the most non-intrusive method of tanking the RJ85. It utilizes existing fastener holes in the airframe to achieve maximum airframe safety and service life.

The USFS placed a high priority on fatigue monitoring, damage tolerance and fracture mechanics when it sought proposals for next generation air tankers. This was because of two in-flight structural failures that occurred in 2002 with military surplus air tanker designs and in-flight breakups in earlier years.

“The feedback from wildfire agencies, aerial supervision staff and the ground firefighters to date has been very positive,” added Berry. “The wildfire situation is changing, and so are the needs of the firefighter. We set out to design a tank that would produce high flow rates and generate a range of consistent, repeatable retardant coverage levels needed by firefighters battling different kinds of fires in different fuels.”

Conair achieved a flow rate in excess of 12,000 litres per second on the RJ85 tank and has met or exceeded the coverage level requirements during testing on behalf of the USFS Interagency Airtanker Board.

The company is actively marketing the RJ85 to other national firefighting agencies as a new tool to help achieve the right firefighting fleet balance, as it builds on its success in the United States and now Australia.

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