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Comment by dkn | Hacker News Reader

Actually our airspace was saturated. We had more aircraft ourselves we could have put up but it would have been unsafe to do so.

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Really? The fire is over 1000 square km, and there's only like 30 aircraft, right? Plus SA isn't contributing aircraft, only people that have gone through a 10-day "boot camp".

It seems very weird that Russia and the US have nothing to contribute, but inexperienced folks from SA do.

By the time Russia came along, much of the populated area's were out of harms way. Adding more aircraft that are all using 1 or 2 airports is just more congestion.

An advantage of all Soviet-era planes is they can use any crappy airfield without breaking a sweat.

Russian firefighting aircraft are sea planes they are designed to land in a lake or in littoral waters to take on water they've been very successful at fighting fires in Greece and Israel with using the med as their water supply.

With a wildfire there's no point in fighting 99% of it - you fight the edges that are near people/property, try to contain it, and wait for rain and for it to run out of fuel. So of a 1000 sq km fire it may only be a few dozen linear kilometers that are being actively fought.

This is the correct answer.

From a forestry management perspective, you don't want the forest to live forever, and trying to prevent old, dead trees from burning is a nightmare. Let the fire burn, protect the property, and the forest will reseed itself during the fire.

They don't land just anywhere, plus you need a tower to coordinate them, and Ft. Mac is hardly a bustling metropolis.

No it was not, please don't repeat made up excuses for bad political decisions.

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