Guy is currently one of the pilots flying the Erickson Skycrane that is assigned to the Stead fire-fighting base this year. I say currently because he is actually assigned to fly from one of Erickson’s bases in Greece this summer. They operate on a 3-week cycle of work and free time and  just arrived back in the U.S. for his break. He was enroute to his home in Northern California when he got a call that they really needed him as a crew member at Stead for a few days. It was just a lucky coincidence that we met yesterday. We talked in the hangar for a while and then he said he’d be happy to give me a tour of the Skycrane. I jumped at the chance. Of course, I had to call my wife and let her know. She has watched the Skycranes operate from Stead for years and has always been fascinated with their size and capabilities. When she heard about the tour opportunity she dropped everything, jumped into the car and headed for the airport. If you are a Twitter user, you may recognize her as @yaksierra .

To say that the Skycrane is big is  a bit of an understatement. It is almost 90 feet long and it’s main rotor has a span of 72 feet – that’s twice the wing span of a C-172/182 or Beechcraft Bonanza.  Erickson names each of it’s Skycranes. The most famous is “Elvis” which made an appearance at EAA’s AirVenture last year (This year the crowd there is seeing “Goliath”). The Stead Skycrane this year is named “Malcolm.”

This photo is of the fire-fighting water tank that is attached in the area normally taken up by the winch/sling apparatus. As you can see, the tank holds up to 2650 U.S. gallons of water. The actual amount that they carry is dependent upon their fuel load, the temperature and the density altitude (sound familiar?). The fitting you can see in the middle of the aft ’7′ is a fill valve for a 70-gallon foam tank. The foam can be injected into the water tank enroute to the fire. The foam is a detergent-based surfactant that, in effect, makes the water wetter.  The gray area at the bottom of the tank is one of the full-length doors in the fully open position.  The long hose is the pond snorkel. It has an electro-hydraulic pump at the bottom end that can suck water into the tank from any water source that is at least 18″ deep – and fill the tank in as little as 45 seconds. The tank can also be equipped with a sea snorkel that can be used to scoop up water while the Skycrane maintains forward motion – this eliminates the water spray up into the rotors that occurs when the filling process is done from a hover. The tank can also be filled with fire retardant very similar to that used by the fixed-wing tankers.  A control panel on the center console in the cockpit is used to set the amount and rate that the water is dumped.

There is also a water cannon that can be fitted to the left front of the Skycrane. It is capable of shooting a water stream up to 160′ to the front at a rate of 300 gallons/minute. It could be used to fight a fire in a high-rise building. You can see it demonstrated on the Erickson web site.

This photo shows the rearward-facing pilot seat. The crew complement for fire-fighting is two pilots, however when the mission is heavy-lift construction (placing large items on construction pads or erecting tall towers) a third pilot is added to the crew. This third pilot sits at a station to the rear and below the main pilots. There is a clear view from there of the load suspended from the hoist/winch. When the load is to be placed into position this rear-facing pilot takes control of the Skycrane and can position the load exactly where it needs to go.

The Erickson fire fighting operation is day, VFR only which is reflected in the relatively sparse instrument panel that you find in the cockpit. Here you can see the control sticks (cyclic) at both seats and the collective for the right seat. One of those switches you see on the collective controls the pump at the end of the snorkel. The amount of water in the tank is indicated on a digital display in the top center of the left instrument panel. The center console is home to a lone Garmin 500 navigator and the VHF and FM radios. The FM communications band is used to talk with the fire fighters on the ground.  The right seat pilot on this crew used an ingenious method to keep track of all the information they needed when they were last dispatched to a fire. The bottom right block has all the Stead frequencies.

For those of you who subscribe to the idea that a helicopter is 10,000 parts flying in loose formation in an oil slick. Here is a photo of a large number of those parts – the main rotor mast head and transmission housing. The bell housing in the bottom is where the rotating turbine shaft of the right engine is changed to the other-direction rotating, flapping, twisting, retreating and advancing motion it takes to keep a helicopter in the air. I am not a helicopter pilot but if I were that would still look terribly complicated to me.  Maybe some of you helicopter pilots out there can make sense of all those moving parts.

The EAA media people were interviewing the pilots of Goliath at the same time that my wife and I were touring Malcolm. This is the video that EAA put up on their site.

When I drove onto the airport I noticed that the local fire-fighting tanker base was open for business again this year. It probably has been for a month or so. We saw the Neptune making some runs to the south of us today. The weather has been fairly unsettled this week. Every afternoon huge storms have been building along the mountain ridge between Reno and the Lake Tahoe/Truckee area and also down south near Minden/Gardnerville. I would not be surprised if lightning from those storms set off a fire or two. The small aircraft in front of the tanker base are AT-802 Air Tractors. They are used for the smaller fires, while the Lockheed SP-2H Neptune is used for the larger ones.

Added July 16th:

I went out to the airport today to drop something off at the hangar and found a familiar sight on the ramp. It seems that our tanker base has added a Skycrane to it’s line-up.

I visited with a couple of friends at the airport and then dropped some things off in my hangar. On the way out I found that the row of jets normally parked at the east end of the ramp was now located at the end of my hangar row. Their normal parking area is now used as the ramp area for the Air Tractors.

The first jet in the row, with the 56 on the nose, is officially a Polish SB-LIM2 which is a Mig-15UTI (NATO name "Midget").  It was the Warsaw Pact’s advanced jet trainer.  Except for Poland, the Pact’s  primary jet trainer was either the Czech L-29 (Delfin) or L-39 (Albatross). The last three jets in the line are L-29s. The second jet in the line is a Polish LIM-5 also known as a Mig-17. this one is a single-place model. Other than the obvious distinction that one  of these is a 2-place and one is single-place, how do you tell them apart?  If you look at the large version of the photos and note the flow fences on the top of the wings, you will see that the Mig 15 has two fences while the Mig-17 has three. That seems to be the easiest distinction to me.

There are detailed entries in Wikipedia for both the Mig-15 and the Mig 17 if you are interested in doing a bit more reading on their histories and capabilities.

Reno-Stead airport is never short on interesting aircraft to look at and photograph – even on a ‘normal’ day.

Half of the flights I make in my employment as an international airline pilot are completed at night.  That has it’s pluses and minuses.  The final leg of most of my trips is usually an all-night flight from Tokyo back to my U.S. base.  That last flight in June happened to coincide with a Lunar Eclipse. I had seen it mentioned by someone I follow on Twitter but had forgotten about it until someone on the overwater air-to-air frequency mentioned that the eclipse was starting. I was sitting in the right seat and a full moon was sitting right outside my window. I grabbed my camera and took a few shots as the eclipse progressed. I combined them into a single photo showing the progression.  As you can see, it was a partial lunar eclipse. I took the photos at FL340 while we were flying between 170E and 170W at 49N.  Luckily there was no high cirrus cloud cover that night and the shots were fairly clear.

Unfortunately, turbulence was an ongoing problem in my efforts to record the eclipse. I saved one of my more artistic attempts to take a photo while the plane was bouncing around. I quickly learned not to mess around with the shutter speed.  Maybe I could to license this shot to Google….

I picked a pretty good time to do the polishing since the weather wouldn’t of allowed me to go flying. We had either clouds sitting on top of the mountains or winds gusting in the 30-knot range for the majority of the week. The day after I finished polishing the weather broke and I was able to take a friend over the mountains to a fly-in lunch meeting in Sacramento. I nice end to my time off.

Back at work I had another a 12-day jaunt around Asia. I carry a notebook computer when I go out on my airline trips – it’s an older 6-lb version that both gets me a little exercise lugging it around and keeps me from sitting in the bar on layovers to pass the time. It also keeps me in contact with the outside world. Some of the places where I lay over have little in the way of English television. Almost all have CNN and some have BBC, but often that is it for English ‘entertainment.’  However, as things often go, on the first layover of the long trip my computer started shutting down without warning every hour or so. That makes it very difficult to accomplish anything but it teaches you to save your work often.  The restart was then frustrating too since I would get all those ‘checking files since the program was shut down improperly’ messages. I tracked it down to a failed cooling fan. The computer was heating up, reaching it’s operating temperature limit and shutting down as a protective measure.

My first work-around for the problem was to place the computer over the room air conditioning outlet – one of those units you find under the window that makes the loud noises that keep you from sleeping. That worked for the first night. The next layover had ceiling AC outlets. Hmmm. My solution was to fill a couple of ziplock bags with ice and put the computer on top of them. Surprisingly (or not) that worked pretty well. It wasn’t too stable, but it allowed me to get some work done. (note: it’s best to use bags without holes in them.) One of my subsequent layovers allowed me to visit an electronics store where I was able to buy a reasonably-priced computer stand with two built-in cooling fans. That third method worked the best and was definitely less of a mess to clean up.

The things we do to stay on-line.

When the early mail and passenger routes were being developed it became obvious that some accurate means of navigation would be required to make the flights more reliable. The use of beacons shining lights or signal fires were acceptable first steps, but aviation leaders could see that flight in less than ideal weather would be necessary. The logical solution was radio-based navigation. The first iteration in radio-based navigation was the Low-Frequency (LF) Radio Range, also called the A-N Range and the Adcock Range (after the designer of the LF antenna array).

I had heard about A-N Range navigation but had not read much about them or how they were used. A-N Ranges were deployed in the 1930s and 1940s and were replaced with the more modern and accurate VOR navigation in the early 1950s.

A friend of mine lost his father about 6 months ago and in removing his father’s personal items from his house came across several aviation-related items. He was nice enough to pass some of them along to me. His father had been a military pilot and had kept flight manuals from a variety of aircraft. He also had among his aviation memorabilia 2-3 Low Frequency Radio Range navigation charts.  This section of one of the charts shows the area around Chicago, IL. while the one above it shows the section containing the chart legend.  these are sections of the CG to FV chart (Chicago to Ft. Worth, TX) that, according to the distance legend on this section was drawn in 1938 and redrawn in 1942. I have highlighted the area around Joliet, IL because in researching information about A-N navigation I found myself (of course) at the Wikipedia entry for the subject. One of the pieces of information I found there was an instrument approach chart for the Joliet, IL airport using the radio beacon shown on the navigation chart. The approach plate is dated 1957 and by then VORs were being placed into service.  The JOT VOR (114.4)  is visible on the approach plate.

Then, as a final push to get me to finish writing this article, the June issue of the AOPA PILOT magazine has an article by Barry Schiff on navigating the A-N ranges (Play it by Ear, p. 30) and related that an actual A-N Radio Range has been reconstructed and put into operation by Airline Transport Communications, Inc. and International Radio Station WWRB.  Their web site has a link in a YouTube video discussing the project and demonstrating it’s use on an actual flight. Here is the video for your added entertainment and education.

A 10-minute video with an actual flight on a reconstructed A-N low frequency radio range.