P2V-5/7 Neptune Firefighting air tankers now grounded

[airattackimages]

I really, REALLY hope this doesn't end up like last years' Aero Union debacle, after which the most capable air tankers around (the P-3A) were disallowed from fighting fire. Losing the Neptunes would finish off the already decimated and nearly non existant federal large airtanker fleet.

Neptune Aviation discovered a large stress fracture in the wing spar of one of their Neptunes. Effective today, all Neptunes were ordered home to sit in lieu of emergency airframe inspections. Minden T-55 left Austin this morning I am told, headed home to Nevada.

The grounding didn't come from the USFS this time, but essentially will have the same end result if not cleared ASAP.

The USFS basically has no large airtankers at this point, except for T-40, the lone BAe-146 tanker currently carded in the US. Its been a DRY winter, let's hope those Neptunes are cleared, or this coming fire season will be a nightmare that makes last season look tame.

Evergreen decommissioned their 747 VLAT. 10 Tanker Air Carrier was preparing to close up shop last I had heard after California cancelled their exclusive use contract for their DC-10. Not good. Cal Fire will have to rely completely on their fleet of 23 S-2Ts with 1200 gallon capacity. The rest of the country will be worse off without the Neptunes, left with one BAe-146 and less than two dozen SEATs. Yikes.

[Jagdflieger]

Yikes!

Fought fires on a helitac crew for a few summers while in college and it was always a relief to see the vomit comets inbound with a load of slurry.

[Daveroo]

about tanker 910,as an ex-firefighter...i got in the habit of listening to my scanner alot,and still do...now i listen to aircraft and trains mostly...one of the places i monitor is MClellan airpark in sacramento,at the end of last summer..dont remember the dates..but i do rememeber it was after the areo union grounding,a large fire was burning in texas,,910 was stationed at McCellan of all places ( it usually was,as they seemed to feel Sac was a mid point,it would fly from there to SoCal,or to the Oregon border from there and back often on fires..well heres the deal....910 was flying from sacramento to texas on "load and return" flights daily for about a week,it would take off around 6am the first time and was back around 8 pm..i would hear it at differant times during the day....and i wont try to say what the turn around time was..but id hear them on approch and then again on taxi for the runway bound for the fire...i called Mr Cook to ask him if he could verify if what i was hearing was correct...could that DC10 make two trips to texas and back a day?...seems so cause he said thats what he was seeing and hearing aswell.....blows my mind that california or the USFS is letting an asset like this go....but were going to pay canada to use thier planes i guess....do what we got to do

[TARPSBird]

The P2V's are very old airframes. It's probably a prudent move to ground them until they can be inspected for structural integrity. We've all seen that video clip of the C-130's wing failure during a firefighting mission, wouldn't want to have a repeat of that.