Fire bombing gone wrong

[bunyip]

About 30 years ago I worked for a conservation department and one of the pre summer jobs was fuel reduction burns, to do this a small aircraft was used with two crew and pilot, they would have a box of what were like table tennis balls which were about quarter full of potassium permanganate, they also had a large syringe and needle loaded with glycerine, the idea was to fly over the area to be burned, inject a ball with an amount of glycerine and toss it out the window, about 30 seconds later this mixture would ignite and hopefully start a fire.
Several hundred of these balls had to be thrown out to make the job effective and the operators had to work quickly because of the aircraft speed.
Enter the engineers, they built a machine that could do the same job in a fraction of the time and with one operator, they could cover a greater area in less time by flying faster and delivering more 'bombs'.
The machine was built and was an impressive piece of kit, hit the switch and balls dropped into a tube, needle in and inject and release into a chute which exited the bottom of the fuselage, we watched it being demonstrated on a test bench and it could throw out more balls in a minute than two operators could in quarter of an hour.
The machine was duly fitted to the aircraft and away it went to perform it's magic, we expected to see lots of smoke in the next hour or so but instead we saw and aircraft return rather hurriedly and a white faced operator emerge.
One thing the engineers had overlooked was the venturi effect, we were told that as soon as the machine started about 20 balls went down the chute and were injected but as soon as they were released the venturi forced them back up the tube into the hopper, the operator turned the machine off and opened the top and fished out about 500 of these balls and tossed them out of the window before they ignited, having no idea which ones were live he had to jettison the lot.
I believe he didn't come back to work for a while after this character building experience.
Meanwhile we went back to the old method until the problem was fixed.

 

[Kentuckyfarmer]

They sure should have tested it with dummy rounds first. Some people are so smart they are dumber than a rock. I bet the guys in the plane would have liked to stick a couple of those fire bombs in those smart ones where the sun don't shine. That's real pucker factor there.

 

[bunyip]

I used to see the results of avoidable accidents and the gods always justified their positions with comments like 'they are experts, they know what they are doing' when clearly they didn't.
Unfortunately my job was to clean up the mess afterwards by having to tell Mrs Smith that her boy won't be coming home tonight because he jumped out of the wrong side of a chopper and ran up the hill into the blades despite being told to jump out the other side and run down hill.
The chainsaw operator who dropped a tree on himself and no one knew where he was because he was smarter than the inexperienced crew he took out and told them the location was a surprise, that cost him his leg.
I spent three years with them and never have I seen such collective idiocy, went back to corrections where they at least adopted some common sense rulings.

 

[comancheflight]

As a flight instructor I have heard many stories my two favorite are.

1.) Another instructor was giving instrument instruction. The student flying an approach told him to take the controls. The student proceeded to open the side window and began to puke...well, my instructor friend said chunks were swirling around and hitting the back of his head. When they got on the ground the cabin was coated and some did make it out and down the side of the plane. He made the student clean it up...we both laughed quite a while.

2.) Some guys at the airport were contacted by a family to spread the ashes of a relative. No problem, they said they could just put a funnel out the window. Let's just say one said he was pretty sure he inhaled a fair amount of somebody's uncle..

 

[dodge man]

Plane on fire, not so good, no place to run. I always heard the expression from a pilot, "you can't have to much fuel on board your airplane unless its on fire".

 

[bunyip]

I used to delight in telling my kids about the time I jumped out of a blazing aircraft with no parachute and walked away, the bit I neglected to tell them was that it was on the ground, I was replacing a radar module and it caught fire and I didn't have time to get it out working in the confines of a small fighter aircraft cockpit.