'The system of aeroplane observation should consist of a network operation by one or more machines. The aeroplane should carry a transmitting-wireless set and the ground patrol or other ground body a receiving set.' Judge Leonard Stretton, Royal Commission into the Bushfires of January 1939.
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The current debate over the level of firefighting aircraft available, who should pay for them, and how effective they are, is not a new debate in Australia. Since the 1930s aeroplanes were part of the consideration of bushfire suppression, and they have been used from the 1960s.
Today in the face of the increasing prevalence and severity of fire, whatever the cause, that debate continues. Who should pay for our aircraft, how many do we need - and are they worth the cost?
The evolution of firefighting with aircraft
The effectiveness of aircraft as a firefighting tool was recognised from the early days of flight. After WWI planes were used around the world to spot fires and direct ground resources.
While Australia was slow to use the plane widely (they were 'expensive', something we'll come back to), after the 1939 fires in Victoria they became part of the response, used to locate blazes in remote areas.
As the size, manoeuvrability and carrying capacity of aircraft grew, they were modified in the US and Canada to deliver water and chemical retardants. Former water-capable large aircraft such as the B-25 Mitchell, Douglas B-26 and DC-4 were among the first used in the 1950s and 1960s overseas.
But not until the early 1980s did Australia's national scientific research institution the CSIRO conduct a series of bushfire experiments designed to, among other things, test the efficacy of aerial firefighting.
Called Project Aquarius, it was born out of a growing awareness of a heating climate and a realisation some of Australia's firefighting practices were falling behind the rest of the world's best responses.
Firefighting had been an ad hoc affair in Australia until the 1940s, when the findings of the Stretton Royal Commission into the 1939 Black Friday fires recommended the formation of the Country Fire Authority out of Victoria's bush fire brigades.
While our on-ground tactics to combat fire were developing strongly, the use of scientific aerial methods had not been pursued as widely. For example, in 1966 chemist David Packham had helped develop an aerial ignition system for backburning in forests, but the use of aircraft to fight fires was still relatively unexplored.
'The whole Australian race has a weakness for burning.' Stretton, 1939.
Australia is a land which naturally encourages bushfire activity. Study of the ecology and soil structure in the country reveals the continent was prone to burning long before the evolution of humans; after their arrival, a species which uses fire as a tool changed the landscape forever .
In his book Burning Bush: A Fire History Of Australia, author Stephen Pyne writes during the Tertiary geochronological period, the beginning of which saw the extinction of the dinosaurs and almost 65 million years later the rise of primates, aridity became prevalent on the continent. Deserts expanded; trees evolved to cope with a waterless existence. Around 34 million years ago, fire-loving eucalypts and acacias appeared.
Rainforests disappeared; cycles of wet and dry periods became established. Lightning-ignited fires became the norm.
WATCH: PROJECT AQUARIUS
"Fire created the conditions for more fire," Pyne writes, "Fire forced, fire stressed, fire quickened. Fire's dynamism made it, over the short term, the most powerful of the determinants shaping Old Australia."
Pyne argues that fire was the lever which was both the most sensitive and powerful to alter landscape. By the time of European colonial invasion, millenia of Indigenous fire use, honed to deliver specific outcomes, had further altered the landscape irrevocably.
Indigenous groups used fire for hunting, to clear land, and after the colonisation of the country, to occasionally attempt to drive off settlers. The burning regimes were complex, tied deeply to belief systems and an intricate knowledge of the seasons and topology.
That is not to say Indigenous fire practices did not go wrong, and when they did, there was little to do but wait until the conflagration burnt itself out.
Europeans came to Australia with a different history of wildfire, one where, for the greatest part, it had been controlled and moved to the edge of experience. For the colonisers, coming to a place where fire literally ruled existence was at first a novel experience - until they realised the destructive power it had in this dry land.
The monstrous fire of 1851, Black Thursday, was widely described across the media of the day because of its unprecedented (for the colonists' experience) ferocity.
'Fires covered a quarter of what is now Victoria (approximately 5 million hectares). Areas affected include Portland, Plenty Ranges, Westernport, the Wimmera and Dandenong districts. Approximately 12 lives, one million sheep and thousands of cattle were lost.'
In the following 150 years, Australians learned of the destructive power of bushfire and its growing frequency.
Project Aquarius
The Victorian government used RAAF Hercules C130s in the early 1980s to test chemical fire retardant released from a modular airborne firefighting system (MAFFS) while, funded by a $3 million grant from the Fraser government in 1980, the CSIRO Division of Forest Research considered almost every detail of bushfire in the three-year Aquarius study, beginning in 1984.
A comprehensive study of the efficiency of using fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters to fight fire, the CSIRO hired a Canadian Conair DC6, a Bell 212 and Bell 206B medium helicopter and a Thrush Commander light agricultural aircraft.
But a conclusive result was never reached on their effectiveness. The Hawke government cut funding to the CSIRO, although it did help establish the National Bushfire Research Unit. At the time, opposition spokesmen for the arts, heritage and environment David Connolly urged the government to commit to $1 million funding a year for fire research, saying bushfires cost the country 'between $25m - 50m per annum.'
Our current fires have cost an estimated $100 billion. Australia still has no overarching national aerial firefighting strategy in 2020.