Got an interesting email today from Delaware. Ted Waltz, Kenny Chapman, Steve Whitby, Tom Wenk? Can anyone help this guy out with some history or photos? Some info is available online from Warbird Alley.
From: Dennis Krepil <fa*************@gm***.com> Subject: C-119B Tanker 87 is alive and well. Message: Hello Fire Aviation: Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Dennis Krepil. I am currently the volunteer crew chief in the restoration project of Tanker 87 — N13746 from the Hemet Valley Flying Service.
This C-119B is currently at the Air Mobility Command Museum in Dover, Delaware. It is in its original status as USAF C119B : S/R # 480352. It is in the color scheme of its time in the Korean War. I am unable to send any pictures; however, it can be seen on the Air Mobility Command, Dover Delaware website progress report.
I am trying to honor this aircraft for its military and civilian service. Researching its history has led me here. Can you help me? I have looked on the Hemet Valley and Cal Fire websites but have been unsuccessful so far. I am trying to find out how this aircraft was set up as a firefighter, how the fire retardant was loaded, where it was located in the aircraft, and how was the fire retardent disbursed? The jet engine is removed. The bomb bay doors are sealed. The lower half of the cargo bay is off limits due to the fire retardant. Any reference to documents, procedures, or other organizations would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you for your time. Dennis Krepil C-119B crew chief AMC Museum Dover DE
A Turbo Commander “Bird Dog” under contract with the Queensland Fire and Emergency Services crashed in Australia on Saturday afternoon, November 4 and it’s being called a possible structural failure at high altitude. Flight tracking data from FlightRadar24 indicated that a Gulfstream Aerospace Jetprop Commander had departed from the Toowoomba Aerodrome at 10:54 a.m.
The twin-engine Commander was the same type that’s used as a lead plane for large airtankers on bushfires. Commanders have a bit of history of structural failure, even though more frequent inspections and modifications have attempted to address structural issues.
The Australian Associated Press reported that AGAIR, an aviation company out of Victoria, confirmed that one of its planes had crashed while engaged in fire surveillance in remote northwest Queensland and killed three of its “dearly loved” staff.
The crash occurred near the Eloise Copper Mine northwest of McKinlay.
“They’d observed a plane go down, and then they observed a plume of smoke,” Superintendent Tom Armitt told journalists during a briefing on Sunday. He said the plane was completely destroyed by fire.
AGAIR has a fleet of fire bombers and the company’s chief executive Rob Boschen confirmed that the Turbo Commander was engaged in fire surveillance operations. “Authorities have confirmed three of our valued and dearly loved staff were the only occupants of the aircraft, and there were no survivors,” he said.
The Independent reported that Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk said the incident had occurred while firefighters and support teams were working to control bushfires throughout the state. “I am terribly saddened by what has happened,” Ms. Palaszczuk said. “The crew onboard this aircraft have been doing everything they could to protect Queenslanders, and I send my heartfelt condolences to the many people who have been impacted by this shocking incident.”
The Aviation Safety Network posted a report that a Gulfstream 695A Commander owned by Agair Logistics with three persons onboard crashed southeast of Cloncurry, resulting in three fatalities. The Commander took off from Toowoomba Airport and was headed toward the Mount Isa Airport. Birddog 370 crashed about 70km southeast of Cloncurry, Queensland.
Purpose of the flight was for mapping recent bushfire activity in western Queensland. The Commander was cruising at about 28,000 feet when it started a rapid and out-of-control descent, and according to official reports the aircraft at one point had an average rate of descent of ~9,600 ft/min.
Deputy Commissioner Mike Wassing with Queensland Fire & Emergency Services said that other firefighting aircraft had been grounded as part of standard practice after an incident, but he said this was not limiting the ability to deal with the 52 fires still burning across the state. “The aviation community is in mourning,” he said. “And part of that aviation community includes our own personnel from the Queensland Fire and Emergency Services, as well as the New South Wales Rural Fire Service and right down into Victoria.”
A Sydney Morning Herald report said AGAIR is based in the regional town of Stawell in western Victoria, and the company was “utterly devastated” by the incident. Company executives said they will provide full assistance and support to all authorities in the course of the investigations. The Herald has a news report online:
~ A tip of the flight helmet to Max, with our condolences to family and friends of the flight crew.
Fire photographer Ryan Grothe sent over some eye candy from the Highland Fire south of Palm Springs, California, which forced evacuations of over 4000 people earlier this week.
On Tuesday October 31, the second day of the fire, L-55 Travis Strahan — a USFS lead based in Redding — was working out of Santa Maria. Air Attack over the incident at the time of these drops was Tony Duprey, with a trainee up front in USFS Air Attack 12 out of San Bernardino.
“On Monday, the first day of the fire, we did not fly it,” says Duprey. “The Cal Fire ATGS out of Hemet (AA-310) and Ramona (AA_110) flew the Highland Fire that day. The jurisdiction is Cal Fire, Riverside Unit.” He added that Cal Fire S-2 tankerss from Hemet and Ramona, as well as fed contract airtankers, flew it on Monday, along with a Cal Fire lead and ASM C-5 — Charlie 5, an OV-10.
“The Highland Fire was started on October 30 around 12:30,” wrote Grothe. “Fueled by strong Santa Ana winds, the fire was moving at a dangerous rate of spread. Numerous structures and houses have been destroyed, and one firefighter was injured while fighting the fire. As of now, the fire is 20 percent contained. Crews have been fighting the fire from both the ground and air.”
Cal Fire estimated containment at 25 percent by mid-day today, November 2, and said the fire, now just under 2500 acres, may be fully contained by November 8. More than 1200 personnel were working on the fire today, and it was hoped that power could soon be restored to powerlines that were shut down along Highway 79.
Two generations of firefighters from one family is not terribly unusual, and three generations is not unheard of, but there aren’t too many three-generation successions who are all pilots. The Venables in California are one of those successions.
Mike Venable has flown fires for the past 43 years, and he is in the third generation of Venables to fly the same aircraft — Cal Fire’s Tanker 73.
“My grandfather flew tanker 73. My dad flew a tanker 73, and I’m now flying a number seven three,” he told FOX Weather‘s Max Gorden. Thousands of calls come in to Cal Fire every year, and officials like to say they keep 95 percent of the fires to 10 acres or fewer. Their 60 aircraft at 14 air bases and 10 helicopter attack bases across the state ensure that any fire is no longer than 20 minutes away. California is home to the largest firefighting aircraft fleet in the world.
Venable and other pilots can be en route to a fire in just minutes.
“It is kind of like a pit crew, getting them in and out of here as fast as we can to get back to the incident,” said Brian Risen, manager at Hemet-Ryan. The base keeps up to 58,000 gallons of retardant at the ready.
Another asset for Cal Fire is its air attack planes, the OV-10 Broncos; in 1993 the state began acquiring them to replace the Cessna O-2A Skymasters in previous service.
Cal Fire ground crews fight fire from below while the pilots provide support from above. “We’ll try to somehow get down in the canyons and around them,” says Venable, “sometimes the houses and the pools or people on the ground – and try to facilitate exactly what his wishes are to get the retardant where he wants it.”
Like most pilots and most firefighters, though, Venable doesn’t see himself as the hero he’s sometimes tagged as. “I come to work every day, and I climb in this beautiful airplane that the taxpayers of this great state provided us, and I go out and I have a great time,” he says.
The USDA Forest Service has awarded 28 spots on a potential $2 billion contract to provide light fixed-wing aircraft and personnel to support for 5 years the administration and protection of public lands.
According to GovCon Wire, the light fixed-wing national air attack multiple-award contract has a 1-year base period and 4 option years and was competed as a total small business set-aside program. Aircraft will support a variety of missions, including fire support, law enforcement, and project and administrative flights, according to a solicitation published in December 2021.
The contract will require relief personnel to provide daily coverage during the mandatory availability period.
According to the solicitation, an aerial supervision mission’s standard configuration includes a pilot, an air tactical group supervisor, and a second ATGS or instructor.
Contract awards, Light Fixed-Wing National Air Attack
El Servicio Forestal del USDA ha adjudicado 28 plazas en un contrato potencial de 2.000 millones de dólares para proporcionar aviones ligeros y personal para apoyar durante 5 años la administración y protección de tierras públicas.
After 21 years as a fire pilot, Williams Lake’s Guy Ridler still enjoys his job flying an airtanker. Besides the obvious benefit supporting firefighters on the ground, he says he enjoys the constant variety that aerial firefighting entails.
“No fire is the same,” he recently told Ruth Lloyd with the Williams Lake Tribune. With changing geography, winds, fuel types, and fire activity, he says it is always a challenge to put retardant where the client wants it — and do it safely.
How did he end up where he is, an aerial firefighter who spends his time off in the Cariboo region of British Columbia?
When Guy Ridler was just a young boy, he flew with his parents to Ontario from Newfoundland to visit family. It was his first flight — and he loved it. When he spotted a uniformed pilot in the airport, he approached the “grizzled” pilot and asked him, “How do I get your job?”
The pilot replied with a question of his own. “Well kid, do your parents have a lot of money?”
When Guy said no, the pilot told him, “Then join the Air Force.”
Years later when he was applying to universities, with grades good enough to go anywhere he chose, a teenage Guy applied and was accepted to the Canadian Armed Forces and a spot at Royal Roads Military College near Victoria, B.C.
But he also had his heart set on competing in the Canada Summer Games that year as a cyclist on Team Newfoundland, and the military would not grant him leave to attend. Against the advice of his advisor, Guy turned down his spot at Royal Roads to compete in the Summer Games and instead attend Memorial University of Newfoundland (MUN) for one year, planning to reapply for the military the following year.
He was accepted at MUN, and all these years later, he says his military college experience was very different from what he’d experienced at MUN, and despite the challenges, he considered it a job he had to do to get the education and training he wanted.
After completing military pilot’s training — and obtaining a degree in physics — Ridler graduated and landed a job at the Comox Air Force Base, where he flew a Buffalo for the Search and Rescue team. He flew to airshows all over the continent to drop parachutists and also flew them on SAR missions on Canada’s coast.
After his 11 years of required military service, he left for commercial flying. Ridler was hired on as a copilot on a Conair DC-6, and his captain told him, “You are no longer a pilot, you are now a museum curator,” given that the now-retired DC-6 tankers were first built in the 1940s.
The Convair replaced the DC-6 and Grumman S-2 Tracker airtankers and now the modern Dash 8-400 airtanker replaces the Convair, bringing with it speed, advanced avionics, fuel efficiency, and tactical flexibility.
He says the job is 100 percent operational — it’s all about safety and a focus on hazards, to be as effective and as safe as possible — for the airtanker, the crew, and those on the ground. And it’s all VFR. “People think it’s some big high-tech operation,” he says. “But in the end, it’s a lot of experience, on-the-job experience.”
Over the years, Ridler has worked alongside forestry agencies in Alaska, Alberta, British Columbia, Washington state, and even Australia. He’s flown not only airtankers but also birddogs — referred to as lead planes in the U.S.
In 2004 he moved to Williams Lake for his first year as a copilot flying a Convair. He later become a captain, which sent him to Alaska for a number of seasons, but returned to Williams Lake seven years later as the captain of the birddog aircraft.
Conair RJ85
He thinks the smaller and more maneuverable birddog, which carries the air attack officer, is the best way to learn the job. He completed training as a pilot on the 4-engine RJ85 jet airtanker, and began spending his summers based in Kamloops, then moved back to Williams Lake in 2020.
Williams Lake is a city in the Central Interior of British Columbia, in the central part of a region known as the Cariboo. The feature on Guy Ridler was written by Ruth Lloyd with the Williams Lake Tribune and is highly recommended. There’s also a PDF file posted [HERE] that details the Convair’s celebrated history of aerial firefighting with Conair in Canadian Aviator Magazine.
As wildfires burned across the Greek island of Rhodes in July, covering about 15 percent of the island, the European Union decided to invest in up to 12 new firefighting aircraft. The EU then sent 11 planes and a helicopter to Greece — nearly half EU’s firefighting fleet — reported euronews.
Janez Lenarčič, the EU Commissioner for Crisis Management, said he expects individual member states to order an additional 12 planes, and said that manufacturer De Havilland Canada, headquartered in Toronto, has agreed to re-launch production of its iconic “Canadair” aircraft if the EU places the orders.
Canadair Super Scooper
The Canadair super scoopers start at around €30 million, which is currently nearly $32 million USD. (And De Havilland Canada is hiring, by the way, if you’ve got transferable skills.)
De Havilland Aircraft has manufactured over 3,500 aircraft including what’s arguably the most advanced turboprop in the air today. The manufacturer closed down scooper production back in 2015 but now plans to design and build a new generation of Canadair scoopers, the DHC-515 — which probably will be delivered beginning in 2027. New design and production costs may very well push the price tag higher than €720 million for 24 new aircraft.
De Havilland DHC-1 Chipmunks … wikipedia photos.
De Havilland’s been around longer than Smokey Bear. The DHC-1 Chipmunk — an all-metal trainer developed for the Royal Canadian Air Force — was the first all-Canadian design to come out of De Havilland Canada.
The company followed that with the De Havilland Beaver, a rugged and versatile bush plane that can take off and land almost anywhere, helping connect communities in Canada’s most remote northern regions. The U.S. Forest Service started flying planes on floats out of Ely, Minnesota in 1929 — still before there was a Smokey Bear — and they’re still flying Beavers today. Fire personnel in the know call this the agency’s best-kept secret weapon.
De Havilland’s other notable fire aircraft include the Twin Otter and the Dash-8.
The Calgary Herald reported last month that interest in its new waterbomber is growing as the company prepares to launch its new program to build the amphibious DHC-515 in Alberta.
European countries, which signed a letter of intent last year to acquire 22 of the newly designed planes, bumped up their order by two because of more demand from France, while other jurisdictions have also made inquiries. Neil Sweeney with De Havilland said there’s significant demand globally. “It doesn’t matter if it’s in Europe or North America,” he said, “there’s a huge demand. We’ve had countries, both existing customers and new potential customers, calling us and asking about either a retrofitted aircraft or new 515s.”The DHC-515 is another in a long line of scoopers dating to the iconic Canadair CL-215, which was initially designed in the 1960s, followed by the CL-415. Scoopers fight fire across North America, and European customers include Italy, France, Greece, and Spain.Six provinces own or operate the CL-215 or CL-415 models, including Ontario, Quebec, Saskatchewan and Alberta. De Havilland in 2016 bought the manufacturing and design rights to Bombardier’s amphibious aircraft program. In March 2022 the company confirmed plans to build the new DHC-515 Firefighter, with key upgrades including state-of-the-art navigation instruments.
Hunter D’Antuono with theFlathead Beacon, by the way, captured some 5-star photos of scoopers owned by Montana’s Bridger Aerospace over the Elmo Fire on the western shore of Flathead Lake last year in August. Bridger recently purchased four more scoopers — CL-215Ts — from the Spanish government.
In the preliminary report of July 2021 the National Transportation Safety Board said that one of the wings of the air attack aircraft that crashed northeast of Wikieup, Arizona on July 10, 2021 was found 0.79 miles from the main wreckage.
The Beechcraft King Air C90 had been on station for 45 minutes orbiting the fire at about 2,500′ AGL. The last radar data point showed airspeed about 151 knots, altitude about 2,300′ AGL, and that the aircraft was descending, about 805 ft ESE of the accident site. The main wreckage, but not the separated wing, was consumed in a post-crash fire.
An eyewitness said she saw the aircraft coming down at a “steep angle” and then “slam into the ground.” An hour later she and her husband drove to an area near the crash. They said BLM employees told them they they had witnessed a wing fall off the plane in the air before it crashed.
At the time of the crash Pilot Matthew Miller, 48, and Air Tactical Group Supervisor (ATGS) Jeff Piechura, 62, were on board conducting visual reconnaissance and aviation command and control over the fire. Both of them were killed.
Bill Gabbert wrote back in July 2021 that the investigation of the crash would consider that the C90 was one of the models mentioned in an FAA Airworthiness Directive AD #85 FR 78699, which required inspection of certain Beechcraft King Air and Queen Air models due to a danger of wing separation.
The directive was issued after Textron Aviation, who then held the type certificates, received reports of fatigue cracks in the lower forward wing fitting on two airplanes. An investigation revealed that installing washer P/N 90-380058-1 on the wing bolt would cause a premature torque indication. The fix was to inspect the washer and replace it, if applicable, with a different washer.
The final report issued August 23, 2023 notes that the plane descended in a steep dive and impacted the side of a ridgeline in mountainous desert terrain. No distress call from the airplane was overheard on the radio. Another witness observed the outboard left wing falling to the ground after the aircraft had impacted terrain. The outboard left wing, which had separated outboard of the engine nacelle, was located about 0.79 miles northeast of the main wreckage and did not sustain thermal damage.
During a scheduled maintenance inspection several months before the accident, eddy current (EC) non-destructive testing (NDT) of a left wing’s lower forward spar cap detected a crack in a fastener hole. The hole was then oversized/reamed to a larger size, as per instructions, but the EC reinspection still produced a crack indication. The operator then submitted a structural damage report and service request detailing the crack indication to the aircraft manufacturer, who responded that the crack indication required replacement of “the center section forward spar cap, center section forward lower fittings, and both outboard main spar assemblies.”
However, the operator and their maintenance provider chose to repair the wing spar instead of replacing the spars as instructed by the manufacturer. The maintenance facility owner contacted an FAA-Designated Engineering Representative (DER) for the design of the repair, which was installed and signed off on several months before the accident. The DER later claimed no knowledge of the communication between the aircraft manufacturer and the maintenance provider about the crack indication, though the maintenance provider claimed otherwise.
After the repair, an eddy current inspection conducted by a commercial NDT inspector showed the wing spar repair to be successful and did not reveal a crack indication. Further, there were no other crack indications on the airplane.
What is non-destructive testing?
A postaccident examination of the spar fracture surface revealed that the left wing’s lower spar cap had fractured 8from a fatigue crack that began at the aft inboard fastener hole. The fatigue crack measured 2.484 inches in length and exhibited striations consistent with crack propagation. A study comparing the crack length, striations, flight hours, and number of cycles suggests the crack was probably large enough to have been seen visually at the last inspection; therefore, it is likely that the NDT inspector omitted the EC inspection of the fastener hole — or just missed the fatigue crack indication.
The fatigue separation of the lower spar cap was not in the same area where the repair had been accomplished. The repaired area was inboard of where the left wing separated. The DER-approved repaired area was not identified in the recovered wreckage and therefore could not be examined.
The NTSB determines the probable cause of this accident to be:
The failure and separation of the left wing’s outboard section due to a fatigue crack in the lower spar cap. Contributing to the accident was the operator’s decision to repair the wing spar instead of replacing it as recommended by the aircraft manufacturer. Also contributing to the accident was the failure of the Non-Destructive Testing inspector to detect the fatigue crack during inspection.
This C-119B is currently at the Air Mobility Command Museum in Dover, Delaware. It is in its original status as USAF C119B : S/R # 480352. It is in the color scheme of its time in the Korean War. I am unable to send any pictures; however, it can be seen on the Air Mobility Command, Dover Delaware website progress report.
De Havilland Aircraft has manufactured over 3,500 aircraft including what’s arguably the most advanced turboprop in the air today. The manufacturer closed down scooper production back in 2015 but now plans to design and build a new generation of Canadair scoopers, the DHC-515 — which probably will be delivered beginning in 2027. New design and production costs may very well push the price tag higher than €720 million for 24 new aircraft.
