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Saturday, September 30, 2006
P3 air tankers vs. DC-10s 
| | While attending an aviation show at Santa Barbara Airport (SBA) today, the kid and I wandered over to the U.S. Forest Service Air Attack Base, where three of the Service's fleet of air tankers were being washed down and prepared for deployment elsewhere. Clearly they were no longer required to fight the Day Fire. |
| | The Forest Service folks didn't mind our showing up, and gladly answered a bunch of questions. |
| | Among our questions was "What was the story on the DC-10?" Which had made a single drop on one ridgeline. |
| | The short answer was "Politics". The longer answer was more technical. The P3 airtankers like the three we visited are part of a fleet that can be deployed continuously like a serie of water buckets, out of bases like the ones in Santa Barbara and Lancaster that were used for the Day Fire — each is about the same distance on either side of the fire. The P3s are also more maneuverable. As smaller prop planes, they can make drops in narrow and curved valleys and canyons, while the DC-10 and 747 airtankers are best at deploying large drops on ridgelines. Also, drops by the bigger planes are far more expensive. |
| | So there ya go. There are at least two sides of the story; and it was helpful to get this one. |
| | By the way, the Forest Service dude explained that the fire retardant was basically fertilizer. It comes in dry form, and is mixed in tanks at the attack base. It's not explosive when still in dry form. And it's harmless to the environment. If anything, it helps plants grow after the fire is over. |
A wide open place to start
| | I, of course, like. A prototype for this is a movie review system where I own and control my data. Today, I rate movies on Netflix and Yahoo, but I can't get them to share the data with each other, so they make recommendations without info the other one has. If I had a place where I kept my movie ratings and gave each of them a pointer to it, they could read it and I would control the data. It would be very easy to set up, the technology is no trick at all. The hard part is getting enough users to do it this way to gain critical mass. This is also the idea behind Edgeio and Marc Canter's People Aggregator. Open systems, users own the data, silos smell of sulfur. |
| | This is great. We need a place to start with VRM. How about here? |
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