OT again...but nifty...

[peabody]

These are the guys who water bomb forest fires for the Spanish Air Force .
The old company, Bombardier Aerospace, makes these. They don’t ‘motor around”
to fill the tanks---they touch down at approach speed, open the fill scoops, add lots of power, and the tanks fill in seconds.

There’s one scene in the film where you can see the two tank level gauges rapidly go up. The other neat thing is watching the magnitude of the flight control inputs, especially aileron, as they are maneuvering down low---sometimes the pilot is literally going stop to stop. Real flying!

43 Grupo 2012
http://player.vimeo.com/video/48642618
Have fun!

[George Hostler]

That is neat. If Keith Laumer were alive today and healthy (stroke seemed to do him worse toward his last years), and CL was truly still in vogue like the 50's and 60's, we'd see a Bombardier water bomber CL model that takes on water and releases it. This was the type of stuff he'd write about in his book.

[Tom Niebuhr]

The Water Bomber is very close to my heart. All those latches on the nacelles were my baby. The nacelles were a modified version of the Dash 8 commuter.  The CL215 had round engines and was critical to the thrust lines. I worked on several projects with the head of design. He predicted problems when the new nacelles were installed since the thrust line was raised. After the 1st flight of the CL415, the pilots said it had to be fixed before they would fly it again. Many do dads were added to correct the stability problems including slots and vertical surfaces above and below the horizontal stabilizer and mods to the vertical stabilizer.

After going through these growing pains, the CL 415 is now a very good airplane.

[Steve Helmick]

Looks like the kind of training the So. Korean airline pilots need so desperately.  Steve