During my Navy fly­ing career I flew through my fair share of thun­der­storms (and not because I wanted to). In fact, in my six­teen years in the tac­ti­cal jet busi­ness, three of the Tomcats I was rid­ing around in were hit by light­ning, most mem­o­rably while climb­ing out of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in sec­tion where the bolt jumped from our jet to the wingman’s. While both jets con­tin­ued to work nor­mally and we pushed on for NAS Oceana, the strike def­i­nitely got the atten­tion of all four of us. When we got on the ground our main­tain­ers pointed out where the bolt had exited our jet, evinced by a charred quarter-sized hole in the trail­ing edge of the left hor­i­zon­tal stab.

This cool shot was just for­warded to us show­ing an All Nippon 747 hit while launch­ing out of Osaka. What I can gather from surf­ing around the Internet is the jet came back around and landed safely.

And here’s a quick video of the same strike.

(Gouge: FG)

– Ward

Each year, sev­eral squadrons of C-130 air­craft are read­ied for fire­fighter duty: the 145th Air Wing from Charlotte, N.C., 146th Air Wing from Point Hueneme, Calif., 302nd Wing of the Air Force Reserves from Colorado Springs, and the 153rd Airlift Wing from Cheyenne, Wyoming. The mis­sion has been lim­ited to these few squadrons because there are only eight of the Mobile Airborne Firefighting System (MAFFS) avail­able for these units to use to rope in wildfires.

But other mil­i­tary trans­port squadrons could lend them a hand in the near future. Boeing and Weyerhaeuser, work­ing with Flexible Alternatives and ICL Performance Products, have come up with a new fire­fight­ing sys­tem that recalls an era when the mighty 8th Air Force carpet-bombed objec­tives. The sys­tem has been labeled “PCADS,” which stands for “Precision Container Air Delivery System.”

Were enabling [the mil­i­tary] to carry out their exist­ing mis­sion of aer­ial deliv­ery with­out endan­ger­ing the crews or the air­planes, while pro­vid­ing a higher level of [fire­fight­ing] effec­tive­ness, said Rick Goddard, Director of Sales in Weyerhaeuser’s Bulk Packaging Group and a for­mer Marine avi­a­tor. If you can pro­vide a solu­tion that is more effec­tive, both in cost and on the ground, that is con­sis­tent with the tools and train­ing [of the mil­i­tary], and is bet­ter for the envi­ron­ment [than cur­rent fire­fight­ing chem­i­cals], look at the benefits.

PCADS is basi­cally a 4-foot cubic box with a biodegrad­able blad­der inside. The pack­age can be loaded onto any num­ber of mil­i­tary trans­port planes (16 onto a C-130, 70 onto a C-17) and rolled out the back over a fire per the SOP for per­form­ing food drops. The lid of the pack­age flies upward, pulling on straps that rip the blad­der open, spilling water, fire retar­dant, or fire­fight­ing gel into the air.

PCADS sep­a­rates the aer­ial fire­fight­ing sys­tem from the deliv­ery air­craft, said William Cleary, an Advanced Systems Project Manager for Boeing in Long Beach, California. It allows for safe deliv­ery day or night while uti­liz­ing air­craft deliv­ery sys­tems to ensure aer­ial fire­fight­ing accuracy.

And one of the biggest assets to the pro­gram is that it is a mis­sion famil­iar to trans­port crews across the mil­i­tary. PCADS is a tech­nol­ogy that can be mod­i­fied or changed with lit­tle or no cost to the con­sumer, which com­pares well when con­sid­er­ing a fixed aer­ial asset such as an air tanker or mod­u­lar mechan­i­cal sys­tem, said Ty Bonnar, Vice President of Simi Valley-based Flexible Alternatives and PCADS Director of Operations. PCADS is sim­ple but effec­tive tech­nol­ogy which can be used on var­i­ous air­craft, includ­ing the C-130, C-27, IL-76, and C-17 basi­cally any plat­form with a ramp and cargo bays.

Bottom line: PCADS increases the num­ber of air­craft capa­ble of fight­ing wild­fires. The PCADS project is an excit­ing devel­op­ment as an alter­na­tive aer­ial fire­fight­ing appli­ca­tion approach, said Gordon Springell, Gel Business Leader for ICL Performance Products. With the use of Phos-Chek Aqua Gel-K, as seen dur­ing the recent Kingman trial, the enhance­ment of the water medium [with gel] improves, quite dra­mat­i­cally, the PCADS drop char­ac­ter­is­tics, and reten­tion of mois­ture on the ground, and, there­fore, the abil­ity to extin­guish burn­ing fuels on for­est fires, espe­cially in direct attack.

Go here to see a video and a more detailed descrip­tion of the PCADS system.

– Michael Archer