Official Aviation Thread...

[M-technik-3]

Late model J's do the early airframes do not. And even if they did it would not have cockpit cooling, it needs to have an engine running to have air.

[flyboyx]

Does that airplane have an aux power unit? If not, that could be a fairly hefty negative.

[M-technik-3]

C130/L100 was designed to operate EVERYWHERE, Antartica to Sauda Arabia and with no issues. Needs zilch for ground support with exception of a power cart. Perfect aircaft and high wing so stall speed is less of a factor like the Avro and the BAE.

[flyboyx]

i was just checking out the stats for a c130. looks like the payload is potentially 2x that of the avro.

it also appears the average cost of a c130 in today's dollars is about 30 million. i'm guessing Aero Union chose the avro/bae because they can be had for a fraction of the price.

i have been thinking about the particulate ingestion issue that will brought up. i have never done aerial fire fighting and i have never flown an avro. i can say that it is not abnormal for a low slung engine to ingest a sheet of paper now and then while taxiing around on the ramp. the evidence is that there will be a few tiny remnants of it stuck to the leading edge of the blades. i can't say that i have ever seen damage from it. i would assume forest fire ash to be slightly more erosive than paper generally but much less so than volcanic ash. i also had the experience to fly through that once. we were coming out of puebla, mx after the local volcano la orizaba ripped a massive fart for 10 days straight. in the climb passing through about 16,000ft, we flew through about 2000' of black cloud. the engine egt's shot up about 100 degrees and there was a lot of sparking on the windshield. the rest of the flight was uneventful. and once out of the ash, everything seemed to return to normal. afterward, the airplane was down for 2 weeks waiting for engine replacements. that stuff will fuck your shit up like nobody's business.

[M-technik-3]

https://www.dodbuzz.com/2014/02/04/lockheed-to-sell-special-ops-c-130s-to-civilians/

At the bottom of the article it talks about spraying and firefighting in a brief blurb.