2026 Wildfire Season

[YZT580]

No.

Military aircraft maintenance is really good. In many cases better than what civvies do.

But.

Military aircraft are not always designed the same way as civilian aircraft and militaries don’t keep maintenance records the same way civil operators do (we keep maintenance records- they just look different). For example, spare parts are tracked on some fleets completely differently than a civvy operator would be required to do.

So, to bring an ex-military fleet into the civil register means doing all the mods that the civvies care about but the military maybe does not; translating decades worth of maintenance records into a language Transport Canada (and future AMEs can understand); and then get TC inspectors (who on average have a knowledge base that is a mile wide and an inch deep). and probably some ADM to put their signatures on a document granting civil airworthiness. If anything goes wrong- those signatories are on the hook, potentially.

You can see why this gets so hard.

At least there is a civil version certified in Canada that perhaps they can fall back on: the L329 and there are, or were, a couple operating in the Arctic. Might even be dated back to the first of the H model, don't know. I know they have been around for a long, long time

 

[OldTanker]

I'm in contact with one of our vets and RCD Association members who has been evacuated from Summerland. I've shared his situation with the wider BC Association membership in case he needs assistance. So far so good. A terrible situation and only going to get much, much worse I fear.

 

[daftandbarmy]

The absolute state of the central southern interior today. Almost all of the west side of the Okanagan lake is burning or has been burned. Taken with the past few years it’s a compelling case to maybe not live here. Certainly scrap plans to grow the region by half a million.

That was the thinking during the gigantic 2003 fire season, which also leveled West Kelowna.

 

[Cloud Cover]

Town still safe so far. Air is dumping on the Eastern side of the fire.

I’ve been wondering if it has burned down to what used to be called Millionaires row. That seems to be in its eastward path down Prairie Valley Road. All the tidy orchard operations tucked in there