There are only two copter programs I know of that do night firefighting. All summer long I heard Calfire folks lecture me on how it's a total waste, the risk/benefit isn't there, and so on. Locally they've been under lots of political pressure to allow it---we're fighting fire at night in the city, and doing more dangerous hoist rescues in CalFire's area at night, so why not fight fire too? We just signed an agreement with them to do just that. Our program will hopefully open the door to sfae nighttime firefighting in other areas too. CalFire desreves some credit for flexibility on this issue. The part I don't understand, though, is we are not to be used for initial attack at night. In my opinion, initial attack is where helicopters do the most good. After the media event we toured the Sheriff's hangars. Awesome. Lots of copters, Air conditioning, barracks. Then we went home to our MASH compound. Oh well--we still have the most awesome rescue platform ever developed for the kind of work we do.
3 comments:
Is that a 407 at the back of the Sheriff facility?
Yeah....They rarely take it out. The MD500's are much more fun
Yeah, I've actually never seen the 407 before, just the MD's.
Post a Comment