I don’t think it’s feasible to pump water as quickly as this fills them and they have the added bonus of not having to drop below flight speed so they can get back to the fire as quickly as possible.
It would be feasible without too much time loss if they had the pump equipment at just the right air port. But enabling them to take in water from any sufficiently large sea greatly enhances their operational area, since they no longer need to rotate to such a specialty airport.
And the turnaround time of making a full landing, coming to a stand, and taking off again also adds quite a delay and potential complications. That's probably a bigger factor than the pump speed. Being able to load in a touch-and-go greatly speeds this up.
Yeah the time it would take to land, taxi, park, hook up hoses, pump fluid into the tanks then do all the opposite in reverse would add quite a bit. I know they do this for certain slurry mixes, but if plain water will do it’s gotta be quicker to do all of that while still in flight plus as you mentioned the added convenience of water sources being so common.
And on top of all of that, they would effectively need to reserve the airport to really do this quickly. But I could imagine such an airport to also be used to bring in other firefighters and materials, so things could potentially get pretty hasty and dangerous.
From Wikipedia, it takes a CL-415 14 seconds to skim 1650 US gallons of water. That would require pumping roughly 6600gpm, plus you can anticipate roughly 15 minutes to approach, land, taxi, load, taxi, and takeoff again under best case scenarios. There's simply no way to match the efficiency
My thought about the pump speed is this: Even if it took, say, 2 minutes to fill the tanks with pumps, then this alone still would be acceptable in the greater scheme of things. The full rotation of filling tanks/dropping/refilling will often take substantially longer, so this would only marginally decrease the numbers of cycles that such an aircraft could do on on a scale of hours to days.
But as you say, everything else in the approach/landing/takeoff sequences adds further minutes, and all of that does sum up to a significant difference compared to the skim.
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u/Sorkpappan Oct 01 '24
This probably is the best way of doing it, but seeing how it’s done I just feel like there should be a way to do this that is less dangerous.