Why are flying boats not used on wild fires?

during the 20's planes like the short sutherland were huge and were like fling hotels surely they could carry a lot of water from the sea and dump it on a wild fire.


I know a they use little flying boats but why not use something larger|||What work can one large water bomber do that several smaller planes cannot?



Very large flying boats are not exactly hot items, even the comparatively modest CL-215/CL-415 has only been produced to a total of about 200 examples since introduced in 1969, thus an average of less than 4 plane a year. An airplane twice as large would thus sell at an even smaller rate, especially since it would only take part of the market away from the existing aircraft. That low rate of production does not permit much economy of scale, making the CL-415 amphibious a rather expensive plane at over $25 million. Anything larger, produced in lower numbers, would be comparatively much more expensive, making it an unattractive market to enter. So, any large flying boat used for fire fighting today are vintage airplane, long out of production.



By the way, Howard L is wrong: the C-415 is not out of production; it is simply suspended until there is enough orders to warrant re-opening that assembly line. That has been the case since the early 1970's: gather 10 or 12 orders, open the line, make and deliver a batch, lay off workers. Then repeat.



Using a water bomber effectively implies that the fire should be close enough to a large enough body of water, and if the body of water is an ocean with large waves and swells at that time, it may prove unsuitable for scooping.|||They are. There are about 150 Canadair 215 and 415 water bomber flying boats in service today fighting fires all around the world. They are no longer in production because basically everyone who needed one bought one. It wasn't worth keeping the production line open just for the few new ones that might be bought.



When it comes to delivering a lot of water there are DC-10s and 747 that have been that have been converted into a water bombers. The Dc-10 delivers 12,000 gallons of water at a time, more than five times as much as a Sunderland could, the 747 delivers 20,000 gallons.



Remember that we're talking about airplanes here that can go anywhere in the world in a few hours so there's no need to keep a lot of them on standby.|||Bombardier builds a twin engine flying boat specifically designed to do just this. I have been aboard a couple of them. THe aircraft is big.





Out in B.C., there is a company that uses huge WW2 4 engine flying boats for forest fire control. They have three or for of them. The name of th company and the name of the aircraft escapes me at the moment. It is too early in the morning here.|||They do, the Martin Mars are huge and there are many purpose-built smaller flying boats which are the size needed to get into (and out of) smaller lakes and rivers. The bigger boats need much larger areas of water which are not always available near fires.|||Mostly because Short, Boeing, Martin %26amp; Bloom %26amp; Voss don't make flying boats any more. Your idea however has been adapted to land planes. We now have 747 jumbo air tankers for fire fighting.|||Because large flying boats are no longer manufactured no doubt due to lack of demeand so there are none around to use.|||@ lean into it i think the company your talking about is con air i was in williams lake and ther was 3 of them sitting ther yesterday|||Not enough water to land on and take-off from.|||There are some used, modern construction back to the PBY. Stress and corrosion are taking their toll though.|||You mean a plane like the Martin Mars? They do, see the link below,|||there are, most notably the last 2 remaining martin mars up in British Columbia