Some quick housekeeping

Gunga Din, nothing personal, but I think you need to rethink your refueling requirement. I don’t know for sure, but I would think an empty 747 with no load and full fuel tanks could fly an extreme distance in a short time. They could then land and load up on water and retardant close to the fire site, like they usually do. I think Air Force One needs the capability in case of Nuclear War, when they might have to stay aloft for extended periods of time for safety and to conduct command and control, like Looking Glass did during the cold war period. A moving target is hard to hit.

Zeke: “Could this be another catastrophe resulting from the environmentalist war on fire retardants?”
The short answer is “No.” If anything over use of retardant is adding to the problem, but it has been building since the 19th century. Native Americans understood fire and used it extensively to clear pasture for livestock, to enhance grass growth for the next season and occasionally as a war weapon. And they seldom interfered with the thousands of natural lightning caused fires every year. As a result the forests were considerably thinner then. Photographs taken by early explorers reveal MUCH less dense forest growth in the mid 19th century than now. The reason is the European idea that all fire was bad and destroying valuable timber and thus the advent of extreme over suppression of fires starting in the late 19th century. This led to large, extreme fires that seldom happened previously and began as early as the 1910 “Big Blowup” and continued to get worse all through the 20th century and is epidemic now. Forest managers and FMOs (Fire Management Officers) all understand this but are trapped in a bureaucratic catch 22. If they suppress every start they know that they are adding to the problem, but they inherited a mess of overgrown, dense and unhealthy forest to begin with and if they intentionally fail to suppress a new start and it blows up into a major incident, they are responsible and that could be a career ending move. So they launch everything on every smoke sighting and hope they retire before the unstoppable “Big One” happens from the excessive fuel build-up. When I was flying Air Tankers it was not uncommon to launch after a lightning storm and drop 1/4 of a load (450 gallons in the old B-17 I flew) on 4 different single tree fires, then be sent back to reload and go out to 4 more. In 9 out of 10 times those little fires would have done nothing but clean out some old trees and undergrowth and gone out, but no manager was willing to risk that 10th time when it became a 100,000 acre disaster.

Kurt: “Wouldn’t this suggest that thinning forests by timber harvesting would be a prudent course of action along with fire suppression to achieve the same result?”
It helps and is being done but is not a solution. The effect on the forest is quite different. A natural fire in the forest will consume the understory with a low intensity, low heat fire, cleaning up dead grass, brush, pine needle litter, fallen trees and thinning out seedlings and very seldom crowning out so there is little to no damage to mature trees. Timber harvesting takes out only mature trees leaving the understory mostly untouched, allowing for massive fuel buildup and the potential for big, hot fires. Fires hot enough to crown out and destroy even sparse and scattered mature trees. Control burns are a bigger help but much of the Western forests are in such bad shape now that they are beyond the possibility of a successful control burn. There is so much fuel that any control burn would almost certainly blow up into an out of control disaster and no manager would take the chance of ending his career by trying it.