• There seems to be an up tick in Political commentary in recent months. Those of us who are long time members of the site we know that Political and Religious content has been banned for years. Nothing has changed. Please leave all political and religiours commentary out of the fourms.

    If you recently joined the forums you were not presented with this restriction in the terms of service. This was due to a conversion error when we went from vBulletin to Xenforo. We have updated our terms of service to reflect these corrections.

    Please note any post refering to a politicion will be considered political even if it is intended to be humor. Our experience is these topics have a way of dividing the forums and causing deep resentment amoung members. It is a poison to the community. We apprciate compliance with the rules.

    The Staff of SOH

  • Server side Maintenance is done. We still have an update to the forum software to run but that one will have to wait for a better time.

Martin Mars Philippine being retired

DennyA said:
Sadly, it looks like this might be the last season for the Hawaii Mars up there as well.......
Click to expand...

Well that's a total bummer to hear.......:blind:

Seems like the Virtavia Martin Mars Coulson Tanker repaints are the only ones that will be flying in the future.

Tommy
 
More recent reporting... Contract isn't going to be renewed. Apparently Canada wants four smaller $5,000/day tankers instead of the single $7,500/day tanker. Governments...

Why not get two $5K/day tankers and keep the Mars flying too? You'd get the backup of multiple planes, pay less, and still have the Mars's unique capability to drop an enormous load of water.
 
DennyA said:
More recent reporting... Contract isn't going to be renewed. Apparently Canada wants four smaller $5,000/day tankers instead of the single $7,500/day tanker. Governments...

Why not get two $5K/day tankers and keep the Mars flying too? You'd get the backup of multiple planes, pay less, and still have the Mars's unique capability to drop an enormous load of water.
Click to expand...


Well, what possibly could the Ministry of Forests know about the matter, inasmuch as they've only been managing forests for a century, and involved in aerial forest fire control for half of that ....

I love the Mars as much as the next person. Would I like to see them flying? Yes. Are they the optimal choice for today's fire fighting? I'll readily agree I'm not the expert. But it certainly doesn't strike me as unreasonable that 4 newer, albeit smaller capacity aircraft gives more flexible options. In a year, we have many hundreds (into the thousands) of forest fires http://bcwildfire.ca/History/average.htm. So it apart from the concern of the really big fire scenario pointed out by the pilot, where a giant aircraft may have more effect - sheer numbers dictate a spreading of resources that favours numbers.

Furthermore, if you look at where the fires typically occur in BC, the majority centers around south/central. Compounded by those being areas with proportionately more populations means Conair's locale can give far faster response time.

Finally, I'm sure pinning the criticality of availability on a 60 year old aircraft brings in a measure of risk - versus aircraft whose parts supply, repair / downtime profiles are likely better. If a Mars goes offline, the $5000 a day cost differential is moot, if you've got major fires like the ones that hit Kelowna a few years back.

Just saying that we can't let our love of these venerable aircraft cloud our judgement to the point that we're presuming that the experts are wrong. Sometimes they are - but it comes down to more than a reductive assessment of two numbers ...

DL
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top