Background
The Firebuster is a proposed new design of aircraft having a span in the region of 300m, designed for the specific purpose of fighting forest fires. It carries nothing but water which is picked up by scoop, in flight, from a suitable body of water. The aircraft is therefore unloaded at take off (and landing) and has a take-off speed in the region of 25 knots and will probably require a run of about 100m for both take-off and landing. It may be land based (operating from a grass field, say 350m wide) or a flying boat operating from a suitable stretch of water noting that the stretch of water is required in any case for scoop-loading of either version. The wide span is enabled by carrying the load (around 200 tons of water) distributed over the whole span thus there is no significant bending moment in the spar.
Forest fires tend to organise themselves into irregular lines such that there is a continous fire front defining the boundary between the burned and the yet-to-be consumed areas. The choice of 300m for the span of the Firebuster is an estimate of what is thought to be sufficient to enable it to fly along the general line of the fire front so that the lateral position of the front is always within the span of the aircraft.
Across the full span of the underside of the wing there is a line of close-spaced nozzles controlled by a sensor system, combining thermal sensing and radio altimetry, which only opens the appropriate nozzles at a time when their water will reach the ground on the fire front. Each run from the scooping area will carry about 200 tons of water and it is guesstimated this will be sufficient to extinguish 1 - 2 miles of fire front. A patent for this invention has been applied for. Read more details on the Firebuster.