Astonished beachgoers at the Lac de Sainte Croix film five French Canadair CL-415 firefighting planes scooping up water in quick succession to fight the wildfires in southern France.
Explains why they're so gentle about contacting the scoop with the water. Planes 3 & 5 especially had a very strong initial angle and got right above the surface then veeeeeery slowly touched the scoop down.
You don't have a mile of runway at sea. You have 200 ft, and only 40 have the wires. So when you land, it's now, and here. Not the "where should i stop on the runway to have a faster taxi run ?" On the air force.
It also helps to know that the aircraft have different landing gear. Navy's will be overbuilt for the rougher landings purposes while Airforce is lighter for more optimal conditions and weight purposes.
The math is already fairly public for the plane: 6,140 liters, at 70 knots/130kph/36.11 m/s, they need 410 meters on the waters edge for 12 seconds to fill the tanks.
The volumetric flow rate would therefore need to be 511.67 L/s or 0.5117 m^3/s
So at 36.11 m/s it only needs .5117[m^3/s]/36.11[m/s] = 0.01417 m/2 of inlet or about 22 sq inches of inlet, 11 sq inches per each of 2 inlets or about, assuming some losses, a pair 4"x3" inlets.
edit: I also wanna mention steam trains used to do this as well, and it was pretty cool, usually the rail when it approached a water trough for this dipped partially below the water line so the scoops could collect water without creating a problem where a scoop had to be manually extended or retracted at a special interval to operate. Scooping was done on demanding routes like longer stretches, and express routes like done by the Flying Scotsman. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_trough
Nah, they just connect to one of the internet tubes at the airport. There's a whole series of them, and one connects directly to 4chan. Saves a lot of time not having to go there directly.
It's super cool to walk around inside the planes too. The tanks are much smaller than you'd picture but water weight is high. The speed of the plane is what makes the tanks fill so quickly.
Teheh thank you for the smile. Child's face doesn't go online till they're old enough to decide for themselves and wasn't sure how random background people would feel about it.
Anybody see Tim I found his phone but I don't know how to unlock it his wife's ordering food she'll unlock it when she gets she gets back... here she comes now why is she screaming?
Think you're right, just the two. The massive Martin Mars filled 7,200 gallons in about 30 seconds through just two seven-inch diameter inlets. Hydraulic pressure babyyyy.
Mars is such a neat plane, as are most seaplanes. Got to see the Phillipine mars make it's final landing recently before it went to its final resting place at Pima air museum.
Judging by the hands the inlet is about 20 cm wide and 15 cm high, ie. an area of 0.03 m2. From what I can find the slowest that the airplane can fly in calm air is about 35 m/s (~80 mph). This means that even at this slowest speed the inlet scoops through a volume of 1.05 m3 (1050 L) every second. Times two inlets that's 2100 L per second. The volume of the tanks is 6.137 L. So the inlets scoop through enough volume to fill the tanks in just under 3 seconds.
In reality due to many factors the water won't flow through the inlet nearly as fast (ie. the inlets actually push more water away than they scoop up), so it actually takes the planes about 12 seconds to fill up, but the calculation above gives a ballpark figure showing that it's indeed plausible that such a small inlet is enough.
The pressure differential (and physical damage of being forced through such a small opening) would make sure that the diver was no longer recognizably human by the time they got dumped.
I can't really remember. I think it was known about the urban legend, and I think in this case the person had been murdered and the body moved and left in this situation to make it appear like he died from being scooped up and dropped .. may have been a helicopter/basket type pickup they used in the show which seems more plausible than a plane scoop.. not sure that's big enough for a human
Well, one that was big enough to scoop up a human would probably cause so much drag the moment it hit the water that the whole plane would just instantly flip and crash.
And it was happening in California, a very blue state, and we have never not been very appreciative and impressed by the skill and bravery of the pilots who choose that profession to help people.
The president does not represent all of the very large and diverse country.
You guys have to get over this attitude. You may not like him, you may disagree with him, you may have voted for Harris, you may be embarrassed by everything he does, but he absolutely is your president and represents you to the rest of the world.
He's still 100% representing your country abroad. I can tell you the world doesn't care which state you're from when they think about all the heinous shit america puts us all through right now.
Fun fact: Canadair is the name used in France for this kind of plane. I don't think there is known other name used by anyone; when you say "Yesterday I saw a canadair", you assume "a plane landing on land and fighting fire". I think most french people do not know Canadair has many other plane functions too 😆 .
Fun fact, it's actually the French that are helping out in Canada right now.
Other fun fact, Europe (that has a central mechanism for sharing out the wildfire management) is on the way to buying 22 of these water bombers by 2030.
Whenever I see these videos I wonder what the effect of the water is on keeping the plane stabilized while flying. I can barely walk across the kitchen with out spilling my dog's water dish, and these guys are flying a damn plane filled with slosh juice.
Ground effect comes into play, you can see the 2nd and 4th planes particularly being repelled by a cushion of air between water and wings that urges the planes back up.
They really have to ditch it down to get to the surface
I would assume except when actively scooping or dumping the tanks are either completely full or completely empty, either way no free surface for sloshing around.
I was working in an area that was having fires and I saw at the head of the lake where they made their approach was rad having them fly over me so close .
It's been a few videos I've seen from France. It seems the Sécurité Civile uses a different approach than the one used in Québec by SOPFEU.
When using water bombers, the SOPFEU spread them in the pattern between the fire and the place they'll scoop water from. So you'll never see 5 of them scooping at the same time. They do that to limit the time between each drop, or to have a constant cadence of water bombing. Also, they are usually working in pair, so you won't see 5 plane for a single fire.
This constrast with France where they got 5 scooping at the same time, most probably dropping at the same time too, then having a long pause where nothing is dropped.
I wonder why they do differently, if it has to do with water proximity or even having 5 to drop at the same time compensate for the delay. Although that would mean they could spare 3 of them for another fire 🤔.
It's called a noria (generally between 3 and 8 planes) , and it's made to directly hit the flame front to cool it down, slow it down or to "control" wildfire direction to help the ground firefighters engagement.
A noria can airdrop 20 times (multiplied by the number of plane in the noria) by hour if the scooping body of water is close enough to the wildfire.
It's the second tactic when the first one failed.
1st tactic is GAAR (Guet Aerien Armé de Retardant or retardant armed aerial patrol), using DASH8 flying all day long over extreme risk of fire areas to be able to airdrop (generally retardant) very early to stop the wildfire at his beginning, before even firefighter on the ground arrived.
If 1st and 2nd tactic fails, it's almost impossible to stop by aerial means a well established and large wildfire in a south of France forest environment. The only way of fighting is to protect halmets, villages, more generally human made structures, and let everything burn until wind and temperature lower by themselves or edge of the forest/scrubland reached by the fire.
I am sure there a many tactics they can perform to fight a fire.
I guess some fires need more constant drops while others might need one big splash. Just a guess though, but I expect this to be very well thought out.
Not saying they don't know what they are doing, I'm sure everything is thought thoroughly (gosh two of my nightmares word to pronounce 😂). But even for me, as Québécois, seeing 5 CL415 doing a grouped scooping like that is astonishing!
in this area there's a a lot of wind so they don't spread water on the fire but in front of it to be able do stop its course, to control the fire advancement and direction, and fight it on the ground with firefighters.
Fun fact : the helis are named "Dragon" and the Canadairs are named "Pélican", the Dash are named "Milan" (after the red kite bird, not the city), and de Beechcrafts are named Bengale (like "Feu de Bengale" or "Bengal Flare").
In this case these are French owned planes bought from Canada. Not the firefighting resource sharing you often see between Canada and Australia for example.
For the context, in the French language, the Brand canadair is used as a name for that type of planes (even if they're from a different brand) and if you say you're a pilot flying a Canadair, Nobody will think you fly the good old CRJ-700 but these kind of machine
In the France fench language. In Québec we call them... CL-415 or bombardier d'eau (water bomber, and not because they were produced by Bombardier for a long time, it is because bomber = bombardier for the context of non French speakers around here)
It might happen once in a while, but it isn't that common for fish to hang around the top meter of water after a gargantuan shadow splashes down at great speeds near them.
Yes, in fact, all through the history of the world it's happened. A couple hundred years ago, scientist's were astonished to find ancient sea fossils at the tops of mountains and other unlikely areas. Now we know it was due to pterosaurs accidentally scooping them up with waters as they fought prehistoric wildfires.
I always knew my PhD research would come in handy for something! Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to get to my shift at McDonald's.
Yeah, a little bit- but the intake ports on the fixed wing scoops are much smaller than you might think, so they aren’t really scooping anything bigger than your hand, really. And they scoop surface water, which has fewer critters than deeper down.
I imagine for the intakes that small to pull in the amount of water they do in the very short amount of time they are in contact with the water, any fish it scoops stops being a fish and becomes particles the moment it hits the intake
Dont know about fishes but i lived close to a lake where helicopters would come scoop up water to fight fires and ive had frogs dropped very close to me while they were taking off 😅
A plane where function massively drives form and they are all the better for it.
If you are trying to tell the CL-415 apart from the earlier CL-215 there are several visual clues. The CL-215 originally had radial engines but some have been re-engined with turboprops as CL-215T. Only the CL-415 has the winglets and the additional small vertical stabilisers on the tail.
Did it not mildly enrage anyone else that the cameraman didn't film the scoop for the first three planes?? That's the part we want to see and we only got 2/5!
Learned a bit at a museum on planes fighting fires, the amount of water they hold, and how fast it all inputs is... I'm not a smart guy, I couldn't comprehend it.
Note, Canadair never built the CL-415. They built it's predecessor, the CL-215, and got most of the way through the design of the 415, before running into financial trouble.
Canadair was then bought out by Bombardier (another Canadian aerospace company, known for designing/building the Airbus A220) who finished the design and manufactured all the planes.
Bombadier has signed sold the design and IP to DeHavilland Canada who is designing and building the next gen CL-515.
Imagine being a fish just chillin at the surface, violently being scooped up and then dropped from mid air into a blazing fire. Fish be like ‘Wtf did I do to deserve this’ 😭😭
•
u/Dewey081 7h ago
Interestingly, the inlet scoops (2 of them per aircraft) that take in the water are only the size of a iPhone.