LA Fire/Aerial Firefighting

mightynimbus said:
Understood, and you are right,
I was reacting in real time as I rolled my eyes as yet another shortcoming was mentioned.
I should have taken a lap and applied my "CYA" filter to what I was hearing.
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I would never imagine a political official with no institutional knowledge making claims in front of cameras they can’t back up…


We’re getting ready to do an exercise with ~20-24 helicopters and anywhere up to 100 seagull sized drones in the same space… whole damn Army is watching to see how this experiment works out. These things are a nightmare regarding airspace management and that’s with people who are willing to tell you where and when they are flying.


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Murdoughnut said:
Anyone else feeling disastered-out this year? Between driving past our old St. Pete house and seeing the kitchen I remodeled out on the curb, having our western NC mountain trips cancelled and seeing the devastation peopled faced there, to the images from LA ... it's been a rough several months for sure.
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If only there were a common thread uniting these disasters and something we could do about it. Has anyone thought to ask the climate scientists?
 
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MikeD said:
Oh I was meaning with a firefighting aircraft. There have been numerous drones spotted around fires that have resulted in shutting down air ops on the fire. I believe this is the first one that hit one of these aircraft. With an actual hit now, I can see air ops getting somewhat risk averse. Last thing they need is an aircraft go down.
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Seems a dangerous enough job even without having to worry about a drone slamming into the airplane. Maybe I'm just a weenie.
 
WacoFan said:
Seems a dangerous enough job even without having to worry about a drone slamming into the airplane. Maybe I'm just a weenie.
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Class 1/2 drones are arguably already accounted for in that the weight and mass is very equivalent to bird strike data we already have. That’s what your average hobbiest drone is going to come in at. Obviously suboptimal but survivable… But with the conditions it’s unlikely those are the drones that will be operating because of the conditions present.

The scary problem is the class 2/3 size monsters that are becoming cheaper and cheaper to buy. Now you’re talking quad copter and hybrid size drones that are large bird to even bigger than California Condors as far as size and mass. That is going to be a disaster regardless of where it hits, and unfortunately those are the drones we are seeing media and commercial use deploy because of their ability to fly in the higher wind thresholds so that’s likely to be more what a plane would encounter.

That bird strike image posted earlier was a lucky event… this stuff is getting stupidly dangerous.


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Lawman said:
Class 1/2 drones are arguably already accounted for in that the weight and mass is very equivalent to bird strike data we already have.
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Civillian impact standards are mostly built around soft, squishy things like birds. Even a 250 gram drone is going to do a lot more focused damage than a few pounds of goose.
 
BobDDuck said:
Civillian impact standards are mostly built around soft, squishy things like birds. Even a 250 gram drone is going to do a lot more focused damage than a few pounds of goose.
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We have data in the military, both from the bird testing and from the crash/accident studies from what has occurred in action (getting way more common than in comfortable with personally) that shows the opposite. It’s one of the criteria for manufacture given to acquisitions. The damage models are actually favoring drones (I was surprised to).

The drones like Skydios even having greater total mass break up better against things than the birds do. Engine injestion is still catastrophically capable (especially due to things like composite body frames) but talking impact to surface skin the test regimes are in the 400 knot energy ranges to model and account for rotor blade velocities.

Simply put the drones explode better when you smack them with something fast, it’s what happens to the exploded parts that becomes a new problem. It would suck to take one off the leading edge with no real problem but then drag pieces into a nacelle and trash an engine near the same moment you’re post drop and pitching/powering to climb like these airplanes could potentially be though.


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Lawman said:
We have data in the military, both from the bird testing and from the crash/accident studies from what has occurred in action (getting way more common than in comfortable with personally) that shows the opposite. It’s one of the criteria for manufacture given to acquisitions. The damage models are actually favoring drones (I was surprised to).

The drones like Skydios even having greater total mass break up better against things than the birds do. Engine injestion is still catastrophically capable (especially due to things like composite body frames) but talking impact to surface skin the test regimes are in the 400 knot energy ranges to model and account for rotor blade velocities.

Simply put the drones explode better when you smack them with something fast, it’s what happens to the exploded parts that becomes a new problem. It would suck to take one off the leading edge with no real problem but then drag pieces into a nacelle and trash an engine near the same moment you’re post drop and pitching/powering to climb like these airplanes could potentially be though.


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That makes sense. The testing I've seen is all around engine ingestion.
 
BobDDuck said:
That makes sense. The testing I've seen is all around engine ingestion.
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Yeah I would not be surprised at all that engine ingestion is significantly worse given the materials we’re seeing these things made out of. For our safety guys the big risks are structural fragility and then also the crew. Losing motors is just a “that’s why we gave you two and put them in separate areas.”

Users want a drone frame that can be dropped from altitude and speed down a rock filled gorge and be intact on the bottom so let’s use some carbon fiber infused exotic lightweight hyper polymer…. And unfortunately now your turbine blades are wishing they only had to chew through chicken bones and flesh….


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mightynimbus said:
OK official dude,....Any info on why this was not ALREADY done by now??
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My guess is it’s an arms race with morans.

A likely countermeasure is probably weak (jamming the RF link for drone control). If that countermeasure is ubiquitous at every NFL game and TV awards show, one could probably just go back into Amazon and order a kit to get around the jamming.

But when it’s rolled-out for an instance where one of those jerk-wads almost took out a plane and enforcement is looking to pound some ass, you hopefully have significantly fewer people looking to intentionally defeat the jamming.
 
Lawman said:
Whoever did the videos of the Yellow Canadian air tankers and mashed it with the theme to Tailspin needs an award.


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There’s a video I saw of a Bell 212 sling loading a water bucket. There this vertical cliff face that has trees along it, with fire running rapidly uphill, such that fire does. Pilot is heading right towards the cliff face at about the same elevation as it; not sure how he’s going to get a vertical drop. Well….approaching cliff face at a good clip, the pilot racks the 212 into a 90 degree turn, and with the bucket now swinging nearly horizontal under the bird, releases the water and wets the entire vertical cliff face with about 20 feet of clearance from the bottom of the bucket to the cliff, rolling out with the bucket stable below the bird as he heads away for a refill. Impressive.
 
MikeD said:
There’s a video I saw of a Bell 212 sling loading a water bucket. There this vertical cliff face that has trees along it, with fire running rapidly uphill, such that fire does. Pilot is heading right towards the cliff face at about the same elevation as it; not sure how he’s going to get a vertical drop. Well….approaching cliff face at a good clip, the pilot racks the 212 into a 90 degree turn, and with the bucket now swinging nearly horizontal under the bird, releases the water and wets the entire vertical cliff face with about 20 feet of clearance from the bottom of the bucket to the cliff, rolling out with the bucket stable below the bird as he heads away for a refill. Impressive.
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long line and bucket videos are my favorite, love seeing someone sling christmas trees or a bambi around with perfect execution and energy management. so satisfying
 
bimmerphile said:
long line and bucket videos are my favorite, love seeing someone sling christmas trees or a bambi around with perfect execution and energy management. so satisfying
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It’s like that with crop dusters. Some of the best stick and rudder pilots on the planet.


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mightynimbus said:
Indeed, you KNEW it was going to happen, it is all but assumed there will be incursions.
That is what makes it confusing, is that at the press conference 10 minutes ago,
some dude (I forgot his function) speaks to the scooper / drone strike, admonishes people that it is a federal offence to fly them in the FTA
And then goes on to say how they will be deploying defensive and tracking technology to abate, identify and track ownership future incursions.

OK official dude,....Any info on why this was not ALREADY done by now??
It was ABSOULUTELY foreseeable.
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Forseeable.......like 10 years ago when some of SEAT Managers for different agencies started seeing these crawl around...we retired helo mech types KNEW this, but now they are all the rage, ready to put the iron pilots to pasture.......maybe 20-30 years from now and that argument will continue...pizza delivery, bioooooootches???
 
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