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MANAGEMENT IN AVIATION HISTORY BENCH MARKS


THE PLANES Many types of aircraft were pressed into experimental service for the USFS as early as 1947, including the Douglas DC3 (aka C47) which carried between 16 and 22 fi refi ghters with their equipment. Between 1946 and 1947, the USFS and the Air Force quickly abandoned the use of helicopters to deploy smokejumpers after tests proved it to be dangerously impractical. Helicopters thereafter began a long and successful role in dumping loads of retardant and making rescues. The fi rst attempts to drop fi re-retarding slurry began in the late 1950s, using a Ford Trimotor fi tted with a 250-gallon tank with external gates that the pilot could open and close from the cockpit. “The Trimotor was slow,” remembers Cooley, “ but the principle looked promising. Soon the fi rst really eff ective retardant tanker, a Grumman TBM fi tted with a 600-gallon tank, was in common use in Region 1.” (This was Idaho, Montana and parts of Alaska). Several vintage aircraft were adapted for slurry bombing. In 1967, the taxiway for loading slurry in Region 1 “looked like an airplane museum,” recalls Cooley, where in addition to the TBMs he saw a B-26, a B-17 and “some old Navy patrol plane.” Before he retired in 1975, the Travelairs and Trimotors to which Cooley had often entrusted his life were eventually replaced with DeHavilland Otters and Beechcraft E-18s.


A Ford Trimotor drops parachuting Smokejumpers onto a fi re depicted in this painting by the artist known as Onishuk, for the cover of “Trimotor and Trail,” by Earl Cooley. Image courtesy of the National Museum of Forest Service History. [Museum Gift Shop/Books/ Memoirs: www.forestservicemuseum.org]


THE DANGEROUS WORK OF NO. 91586 The TBMs which Cooley saw loading slurry are similar to one now sitting on the simulated deck of a U.S. aircraft carrier at the Cradle of Aviation Museum on Long Island, NY. “It is a TBM-3E, Serial No. 91586,” says Joshua Stoff , senior curator at the museum, who found the old bomber advertised for sale in Trade-A-Plane during the 1980s.


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