Name: How The $30 Million 'Super Scooper' Plane Was Built To Fight Wildfires
Uploaded: 2021-05-26T03:58:41.000Z
Duration: 8 min 16 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

These pilots are flying what's called a Super Scooper.

At around $30 million, it's one of the most expensive

Tim Sheehy: It's literally a boat with giant wings,

It looks like no other plane in the world.

Narrator: The CL-415 Enhanced Aerial Firefighter

can scoop and drop 1,400 gallons of water on wildfires

which could only drop 200 gallons of water at a time.

Sheehy: $30 million is very expensive for any aircraft.

However, it's actually the most cost-effective

aerial firefighting, and Insider got an up-close look

with Bridger Aerospace to see how this aircraft

Airplanes have been used to fight wildfires

but early attempts weren't nearly as effective.

Sheehy: In the '50s and '60s, almost all the aircraft

and they were used in a very haphazard, provisional manner.

Sheehy: Not really effective in today's world,

but at the time, it was the best they could do.

to design a plane specifically to fight fires.

Narrator: Which Viking Air Ltd. modernized in 2020,

retrofitting the CL-215 with a new avionics system,

and created, essentially, a new airplane.

Sheehy: When you look at them, they don't necessarily

look like they'd be an aerobatic or stunt plane.

We're taking a plane almost the size of a C-130,

we're flying it into extremely narrow canyons,

banking high-g turns at a high rate of turn.

in that dangerous of an environment is very rare.

or aerodynamic devices that pilots use to adjust

those flight-control surfaces are supersized.

Sheehy: That's important, because when you're flying

a lot of elevator area to be able to move that aircraft

as quickly as you need to at those low speeds.

Narrator: That's why this rudder is 25 square feet larger

or just over 100 miles per hour, to perform a scoop.

That's almost half the aircraft's standard cruising speed.

Sheehy: Once you've identified your scoop site

Sheehy: The way the aircraft picks up water,

And it scoops it through what you see here,

two probes on either side of the keel of the aircraft,

Subtitles ListPlay Video

How The $30 Million 'Super Scooper' Plane Was Built To Fight Wildfires

extremely

effective

identify

environment