The Government doesn’t care what the planes look like, or the mission they can perform, they care what the paperwork looks like. Annual inspection is only a small part of an overall maintenance program. Without the proper long term scheduled maintenance and air frame inspection detailed and documented by the aircraft operator, these planes will not meet the basic requirements to remain under US Gov’t contract.
The airlines work exactly the same way. An airliner can not carry passengers until ALL the paperwork is in order.
It isn’t helping the air tanker’s case that one shed a wing on video a year or so doing a drop mission. Determination was fatigue cracks in the main wing structure, not an uncommon problem with aircraft of this type used in low level, high performance flight envelope.
I wouldn’t be surprised if they were not “green” enough. More American jobs shipped out of the country, this time to Canada.
The government has been trying to get away from using big old ex-military aircraft as tankers for a while now. The highly-public crashes of some old USAF-surplus C-130As (the incident you mentioned among them) accelerated that, although there was actually a bit of a government scandal around the operator getting those 1950s-vintage Hercs.
What makes no sense to me is hearing that they’re going to be replacing those P-3s—anti-sub aircraft that were designed for low-level flight—with Convair 580s? Those are turboprop-converted Convair 340 twin-engined airliners that are probably older than the Orions! I’d feel safer doing fire attack in an Orion than in a CV-580.
}:-)4
Not sure that these surplus airframes are up to the task of hauling heavy loads of H2O whilst pulling high g loads.
A Cl30 shed its wings during a fire suppression op a few years ago and was caught on film - absolutely heartstopping.
If this occurrs over a built up area the results could be
horrific.