Russian water plane 'unsuitable'
The Age
Thursday October 22, 2009
A RUSSIAN offer to use water-bombing planes with five times the capacity of the "Elvis" helicopter to fight the Black Saturday blazes was rejected because the planes were deemed unsuitable for Victoria's landscape.Following revelations in The Age that two Ilyushin-76 jets were offered three days after Black Saturday, Premier John Brumby also said the planes would have taken too long to get into the skies.Mr Brumby said it would have taken three weeks for the planes, which are capable of dumping 42 tonnes of water a run, to get approval to fly from Australian aviation authorities.Analysis of the planes by the Department of Sustainability and Environment found they were unsuitable and could risk lives. "These big planes they come down to 500 feet. You could imagine in some of these big areas, flying throughout some of our high country, how difficult and testing that would be," said Mr Brumby.Russia was told of the decision to decline the offer on February 21. The DSE's chief officer of operations, Craig Brown, said the Russian aircraft should not be seen as a "silver bullet" saying ground crews, rather than aircraft, extinguish blazes."Flying heavily loaded, multi-engine jet planes slowly at heights of 500 feet in mountainous and possibly smoke-obscured terrain poses enormous safety considerations," he said. "Water dropped from height can break trees off, damage equipment and injure or kill people."Mr Brown said there were no plans to use large US aircraft for this bushfire season.Shadow Emergency Services Minister Andrew McIntosh said the Black Saturday blazes ran for almost four weeks after February 7.He questioned the view that the planes were not suitable for Victoria, saying they had been used successfully in California, Greece and Russia.The DSE analysis was supported in the Bushfires Royal Commission, with air attack supervisor David O'Toole saying larger, fixed-wing jets were not suitable for the kind of fire that tore through Gippsland on Black Saturday. Mr O'Toole, a CFA volunteer, said jets would not have made any difference as the fire was "unstoppable".He said he knew when he first saw the Churchill fire early in the afternoon that "direct attack would likely fail". He said suppression of a fire from the air worked only up to a certain level of intensity, 3000 kilowatts per metre, which was "worlds apart" from the intensity of Black Saturday.Helicopters were best-equipped for this because they had faster turn-around times, and were more precise. Fixed-wing aircraft were harder to manoeuvre and Victoria lacked the infrastructure to support the jets, such as military or other air bases around the state.
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