Why don’t we leverage the pinpoint accuracy of intelligent guidance systems and the safety of unmanned aerial vehicles to fight forest fires by dropping water and/or retardant?
In: Technology
Pinpoint accuracy does basically nothing to improve fire fighting
Fighting forest fires isn’t a question of accuracy, its a question of *volume*
A relatively small fire in Utah burned 12,000 acres and required almost 600,000 gallons (~5 million pounds) of water. Small unmanned craft aren’t going to be able to help you with this.
Even a relatively large UCAV like the General Atomics Avenger (Predator C) can only carry 6,500 pounds of stuff(~780 gallons) per trip and is going to be fairly expensive to operate over the 770 trips it would need for a relatively small fire.
Something like an older and much bigger P-3A Orion can carry 3,000 gallons per trip. Now we’re talking about much more effective trips that can effectively neutralize a small section. You’d only need 200 trips. For even bigger jobs you can pull in a DC-10 Air Tanker and get 12,000 gallons in one go
In all of these scenarios, pinpoint GPS accuracy has done nothing for you, and you still need a sizable ground crew to turn around the aircraft so moving the pilots to the ground instead of the air doesn’t help either.
Fire fighting isn’t an high tech engineering problem, its a simple machine problem. How do I move millions of pounds of fluid from point A to point B. Small fancy buckets perform worse than a single massive simple bucket
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