Why we don't waterbomb at night? | Hacker News Reader

Why we don't waterbomb at night?

knowledge.aidr.org.au

21 pointscpard14 comments

Summary: flying low to the ground at night is dangerous, because it's hard to see.

There is this thing called 'Synthetic Vision' in modern flight decks:

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_vision_system

[2] https://www.garmin.com/en-US/c/aviation/flight-decks-display...

For people who haven't read the article, this is absolutely not a summary of it. It's short and interesting, so give it a shot.

I disagree. This sounds like a reasonable summary. Or perhaps: “[parent]. However, technological improvements have enabled safer nighttime flying, and so Australia is starting to incorporate it.”

California has recently acquired helicopters capable of doing night fire missions.[1] But jets seem to be too dangerous. From article: "Larry Groff of Windsor and another pilot, Lars Stratte of Redding, were killed when their CAL FIRE air tankers collided over a fire near Hopland in 2001."

[1] https://www.firehouse.com/operations-training/wildland/news/...

As an ex-pilot: Too frigging dangerous!

OTOH, I'd be very happy for YOU to have a go at it.

As an alternative, would cloud seeding be feasible for this?

or do both. Planes can fly in rain since cloud seeding is so unpredictable and spotty :)

I think the future of fires needs to be the following: send the 5000 men when it's only 1000 acres, not 400k acres. So detect fast and respond faster. Or heck 2 acres.

Generally, yes. But this also depends on having the sensing in place to detect and respond to them quickly when they start in very remote locations.

Plus, of course, the whole argument that we actually need to be moving the other direction— toward a larger number of small annual burns rather always putting out so that the forest becomes a tinderbox after decades of never burning.

Combined with invasive eucalyptus that thrives by burning.

That's part of why the fires are so bad. Enormous amounts of excess fuel built up from decades of putting fires out every time they pop up.

Many of these fires are over 1000 acres in the first 8 hours. How are you supposed to get 5000 men there that fast?

That sounds like a great goal but isn't very feasible.

1000 acres is ~1.5 square miles

Depending on how well the forest, etc has been maintained, cleared of brush, etc, a fire can move as much as 10-15 miles/hour. At 10mph, it would travel 1.5 miles in 9 minutes. At 15 mph, it's down to 6 minutes.

At least one fire was moving up to 17 miles/hour here in Texas in 2011.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com