The Liberty Gazette
September 29, 2020
Ely Air Lines
By Mike Ely and Linda Street-Ely
Mike: The water laps at their boat as one fisherman dozes and the other reels in his line, then recasts. The rugged cliffs behind them disappear when a large silhouette descends into view. A Consolidated PBY Catalina is landing on the lake and it heads straight for them. When the flying boat touches the water’s surface, its hull splashes, and the fisherman turns to look. Startled, he shakes his buddy awake, pulls on the outboard motor’s starter rope with no success. The dudes end up diving overboard as the Catalina becomes airborne again and flies over them. Such is the humorous opening to Steven Spielberg’s 1989 movie Always.
In the movie, the PBY, a WWII patrol bomber, was scooping up water to dump on a forest fire, a scene that has become all too common in the western U.S. these past summers. The lakes present a quick turnaround close to fires. This means more water-dumps in a shorter time. More water faster means a better fighting chance to put out the fire and save property and lives.
The forest service began using repurposed WWII bombers for aerial firefighting in the 1940s. Later, they added military transports and some old prop airliners. Turbulent conditions over the fires causes fatigue, for both man and machine. Crews sit on reserve and wait like their ground-bound firemen counterparts. When they are not flying, they need to find ways to rest because when they get a call, they are all-in.
I once got a tour of an old C-119 Boxcar, a Korean War era transport, at Hemet-Ryan Airport with my college flying teammates. Ten of us piled into the monstrous cockpit as the pilot told us what many of the switches did, like the red button on the control wheel that jettisoned the load. He got worried when one young lady sitting in the captain’s seat took too much interest in the button, she could not keep her fingers away from it. Had she pushed it, 3,000 gallons of iron-red slurry would have dumped on the ramp—instantly.
When the old bombers and military transports began to wear out, the Lockheed C-130 Hercules and P-3 Orion submarine chaser got signed up. Some are still operating. With each new generation of aircraft came new tactics for fighting the blazes. Slurry bombers now carry even larger loads. They can turn on and off the flow, not just dump it. They can rain the retardant down over a long run.
Today the slurry bombers include some of the largest transports in the world. A DC-10 was used to fight the fires we had here in Texas a few years ago. The biggest is a 747 that carries over 19,000 gallons of retardant. Watching that behemoth glide along only a couple hundred feet above a mountain ridge, a red trail streaming behind it, is both contrast and similarity in which this plane sneaks up on a fire the way the PBY did on the fishermen in the movie, Always.
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