U.S. Firefighters Reject Big Russian Jet

Aug. 12 -- Every few years, with the regularity of a wildfire season, the controversy flares up.

A small but vocal company tries to get a giant Russian-made airplane into the U.S. Forest Service’s firefighting arsenal. The Forest Service rejects the plane. And, with the tenacity of crusaders, the plane’s advocates persist.

“If I sound like I’m fanatical, it’s because this has been a very frustrating almost five years for me,” says Tom Robinson, whose company, a Canadian-Russian-American joint venture called Global Emergency Response, has been offering the Ilyushin-76 to the U.S. government since 1994. “You meet with the various Senators and Congressmen and they think it’s a wonderful idea, and then they call the Forest Service … and that’s the end of it. We never can get to first base.”

Is Bigger Always Better?

Robinson’s company bills the Ilyushin plane, a 180-ton airborne behemoth that dumps more than three times the amount of water carried by the largest U.S. air tankers, as the largest firefighting aircraft in the world. Designed in the 1970s as a military transport jet, it has been retrofitted with two huge tanks that hold up to 10,000 gallons of water, which it can deliver in either one or two large drops.

“We’ve had contact with this aircraft since 1994,” says Ed Stone, who handles aviation for the Forest Service. “In the fires in 1994 there was intense political pressure to use it and bring it in, when we were actually holding [our own] planes down. We looked, and we didn’t care for the product.”

Stone says the pressure came from a senator, now retired, who was convinced that the retrofitted Russian plane’s size and speed would help fight fires. But no such luck, he says.

“It’s about the same size as a C-141 aircraft. If it was such a good idea, we would have tanked that puppy,” Stone says, referring to the C-141. That plane, part of the U.S. Air Force fleet, has not been called on for firefighting.