Firefighting plane crashes in Rhodes

It's possible.
Something does appear to have come off.

Absolutely fucking tragic.

An old friend is a reserve firefighter in his home state of Oregon. By day, he's a screenwriter with many respectable credits to his name.

A few years ago he co-wrote the best film about forest firefighting (I grant you - a pretty niche market..) and, until the strike kicked in, was busy finding backers for a new project concerning the (largely unknown) "Triple Nickles" - the 555th Airborne Pararachute Regiment who pioneered "fire jumping" and protected the West Coast from the onslaught of Japanese fire balloons during the latter stages of WW2. It's a great script, and a bit of history few people know of.

We have no conception of how brave these men and women are.

Unfortunately fire-fighting aircraft crashing into terrain is not that unusual - condolences to the families of the victims.

Another thing, when they take on, or dump the water, the entire balance of the aircraft must change.

Very dangerous indeed.

ironically perhaps they don’s see it as heroic. They train, and plan, and train again, and plan some more, so they can do their day job in front of you on the worst day so far of your life.

In the town twenty odd miles up the road from me is a fire station from which two crew went out and never came back

The reason is some bean counting pen pushing twat chose to cut the staffing levels and so when some poor sod’s house went up only one tender and crew were available. The point being the plan they had practised called for one crew to spray a water curtain as the other advanced into the inferno.

Rolling up with one tender too few to do this and knowing people were unaccounted for two men chose to penetrate the inferno without the safety water curtain. It didn’t go well. At the inquest said bean counters tried to blame the dead for their deaths. That didn’t go well either.

It must take a special kind of something to do that knowing you are going so far off the plan. But i hope there os a special place on hell for those bean counters.

As mentioned above, having watched the footage something clearly came off that plane as it dived groundwards. No doubt someone will eventually make a ruling as to what it was and if it contributed.

All i can think is ‘poor buggers’