Another AirShow.

Very impromtu and entertaining, but not what I would like to see on a regular basis.

Gusty hot day, fire breaks out on the edge of town and screams toward Scone Mountain, within half an hour totally out of control.

Sirens screaming as the fire services came from everywhere but on the backfoot early, with unlimited fuel since the Mountain became a National Park.

The sky roiling with smoke,burning uphill with a 40-50k wind. on the otherside of the mountain houses and horse studs, all in the path of an out of control blaze wasting 200+ hectares in an hour.

Now for the airshow bit, Scone is home to Pays Air Service, besides Charter and Pilot training, along with Service and Maintainance and Fighter Restorations, they run a Fire Fighting Fleet of Aircraft that is often disbursed all over the world......this time there was no place like home.

So I was being entertained by the sight of water bombers and helicopters attacking a very fast moving fire front, controlled by a small twin jet engined plane who continually disappeared into the smoke seeking hotspots I presume.

Enter left stage, a large converted airliner dropping retardent, his two runs were pretty much straight toward me.....quite spectacular, I hope his drops were good, as the nearest strips large enough for him to land were 100 miles away.

They kept attacking that blaze all afternoon, by dusk they had it downgraded, which is good, because the fire had taken out one of the towers used for night landing.
The mountain is a red glow tonight, smoldering piles and fiery sparks tell us that wind tomorrow could be a bloody nuisance.

In the morning we will have an idea of property loss, hopefully not to bad, but thats one air show I would have preferred to have missed.

I used to work as a fireman and fought brush fires. It is an air show I would have loved to see.


Bob

As a young man I fought a forest fire once in British Columbia, Canada. My team was tasked with fighting hot spots anywhere the fire jumped the firebreak the dozers had cut across the front. It was hot, exhausting work and about every 15 minutes the Bird Dog aircraft would buzz us with a warbling siren warning us that a water bomber was incoming. At the time Conair Aviation was using converted DC 6 and Grumman Tracker aircraft and even though the noise from the wildfire was loud, the big radial engines on the aircraft were louder as the planes flew overhead, just missing the treetops. We made sure we gum-booted it as far as possible away from the drop zone since you didn't want to get covered with the red fire retardant.

I saw one of these airshows about 25 years back too, when I was posted to Camp Gagetown NB. There was a well known squadron of Grumman TBF Avengers at the Fredericton airport that sat off to the side in their own little space. They numbered about 25 or 30... One hot summer day a fire had started off in Upper Gagetown and these started to work, I had sorties all day doing low passes just over my roof top. I never saw what they were dropping but I could imagine the same aircraft coming and going overhead at a long ago airstrip somewhere...big radials growling.

So this morning I thought I'd get it right.
Set up the deckchair and umbrella, esky and bino's, lots of interesting aircraft to look at.
No real big ones this morning, but a couple slightly smaller that our airstrip could handle.
Packed it in at 11.0 am, getting hot and smoky, they were busy forceing the fire back on itself, pity the wind didn't co-operate, lots of flareups.

960+HECTARES but no property damage, my hats off to them, so far so good, see what tomorrow brings.

All's well, 20 degree drop in temperature and fire under control, hats off to the fireies.

Now for the cleanup and maintenance ready for the next one.
Inspections and serviceing of aircraft and equipment.

I can honestly say that I kissed a fireman full on the lips. No, really.

She was a fireman back before they adjusted the job title to "fire fighter" to make it usable for either males or females, so she was indeed a fireman, and is proud of it to this day. I was her company commander. I saved her life in a mountainside brush fire. It was a particularly dry fall in 1977 and my department and the three others in our mutual aid group were dealing with an arsonist. Our mountain sat between two others. We lived at the crest of our mountain and spent weeks watching patchwork fires popping up on the other mountains and wondering when it would be our turn. The call came on a December afternoon, and this time it was on our mountain.

Once we got the lay of the land and the fire I was ordered to set up a fire line about 100 yards long across a field full of brush near the end of a forest closest to the fire. We had another team between us and the fire on the other side of that little forest and were in contact by handy-talk. The wind was from our back and blowing against the fire so we felt fairly safe. We began digging a fire brake to stop the fire when it exited the forest. All of a sudden I looked up from digging and saw a line of fire about 10-12 feet tall, all the way across our field, being blown towards us by the wind, which had shifted. There was a paved road forming the uphill base of our brake so I ran from the downhill end of the line to the other end shouting for my crew to drop their tools and run towards the road. When I got to the end of the line I turned to make sure everyone had heard and followed me. However, there was one little figure about halfway up the field still shoveling, unaware. I ran back to her, got face shield to face shield with her, pointed, and yelled "RUN!!!" She still looked at me quizzically without comprehension. With the fire upon us I grabber her arm and ran full-tilt until we were safe on the road again. My crew said she touched down about once every ten yards.

When the fire had passed and I caught my breath, I checked her and then me. The fire had been so close when I was yelling at her, shield to shield, that the left side of her face and the right side of mine were burned (first degree) and our eyebrows fell off at a touch, just like in the movie, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Somehow the other crew that had set up between the fire and my crew had let the fire pass without warning us. Our third line, a field doused by the brush tankers, stopped the fire.

I married her a year later and we just celebrated forty-three years this year.

Bob