Some quick searching shows that the heavy duty cargo drones top out at about 480 lbs of payload. At 8.33 lbs per gallon, 480 lbs of water is about 57 gallons. According the Wikipedia the smaller end of aerial firefighting planes hold about 800 gallons. So you’d need 15-16 of the most heavy-duty drones to match the output of one plane, and of course it’s simpler and quicker to refill one large tank than fiddling with 16 smaller ones.
The thing that would probably get cheaper is pilot costs. At least here, a pilots licence is about 200 times a commercial drone licence, and I assume insurance costs would come down due to not actually putting people in the air.
There’s also an advantage to having more eyes in the sky to spot smaller fires breaking out, and potentially putting them out with a smaller payload.
I can see it having its uses, but the main use would be selling drones.
Also, fixed-wing aircraft can still take off even if their thrust-to-weight ratio is less than 1, because they generate lift from forward motion.
Basically you sacrifice accuracy for capacity, but with the unpredictability of winds over wildfires, I doubt how much accuracy you’d truly gain using a drone.
I don’t think there’s a particular reason why you couldn’t equip a 737 with the remote controls of a Predator drone and fly it like that, but the question is would moving the pilot from the cockpit to a ground-based control center be worth the cost of R&Ding such a system.
Some quick searching shows that the heavy duty cargo drones top out at about 480 lbs of payload. At 8.33 lbs per gallon, 480 lbs of water is about 57 gallons. According the Wikipedia the smaller end of aerial firefighting planes hold about 800 gallons. So you’d need 15-16 of the most heavy-duty drones to match the output of one plane, and of course it’s simpler and quicker to refill one large tank than fiddling with 16 smaller ones.
USAian nonsense.
Metric. 1 kilogram = 1 litre
This reminds me of a kettle I saw once that had temperature controls for boiling water labelled in fucking Fahrenheit.
Kilograms were invented by fr*nch aristocrats in order to kkkolonize indigenous units of measurement all across the world.
As opposed to the Imperial system (yes that’s its name) of pounds and ounces and gallons and ounces. It’s a shame that Napoleon lost at Trafalgar.
It wasn’t good when the *nglish did it either, for the record, but Soviet revisionism started when they got rid of the arshin.
The thing that would probably get cheaper is pilot costs. At least here, a pilots licence is about 200 times a commercial drone licence, and I assume insurance costs would come down due to not actually putting people in the air.
There’s also an advantage to having more eyes in the sky to spot smaller fires breaking out, and potentially putting them out with a smaller payload.
I can see it having its uses, but the main use would be selling drones.
this is ignoring that the planes already barely have an impact on controlling the fires
Also, fixed-wing aircraft can still take off even if their thrust-to-weight ratio is less than 1, because they generate lift from forward motion.
Basically you sacrifice accuracy for capacity, but with the unpredictability of winds over wildfires, I doubt how much accuracy you’d truly gain using a drone.
Could you hypothetically use a drone plane (instead of a quadcopter?)? (Or a drone helicopter) (ignore the silly rich man image in OP)
I don’t think there’s a particular reason why you couldn’t equip a 737 with the remote controls of a Predator drone and fly it like that, but the question is would moving the pilot from the cockpit to a ground-based control center be worth the cost of R&Ding such a system.
Potentially 100 liters of capacity if the pilot weighs 100 kilos.
Which the computer systems would probably weigh a bit but I think that’d be marginal in comparison
Surely such a system already exists to test new plane prototypes?
nope, drones if anything were first developed to fly the old planes as target practice