What was the Cessna doing on the fire?
Usually when we have a BAD DAY with another aircraft, it's a transient airplane who sees smoke and says "OOOH, cool, let's look!" and then they try to kill all the rest of us.
In THIS case, however, it was a government patrol plane, sent out to just cruise the National Forest just south of the Forest where our fire was. When this happens, one dispatch office is supposed to call the adjacent areas and say "Hey, we got a start up on Mt. So-and-so, we're sending a lead and tanker out there, they'll be on Victor 124.55 (whatever)." "Border fires" are a red flag... (right Mikey?) ...usually one area uses one air-to-air freq and so you run the risk of bumping into other folks out there, but on different freqs. So, you always have the other guys' freq's.
Make sense? Anyway, when we got the fire call, I asked dispatch to be sure they called the adjacent forest, because it was obviously right near the border. They DID, yet their patrol plane just happened to be near the ridge, saw the wisp of smoke from behind the mountain, so thought they'd "just come over and make sure where it was". Well, that's a fine idea when you know there are NO OTHER AIRCRAFT responding. They flat SCREWED UP.
It was a nice little fire, early morning so no wind, we dry-ran it and then came around for the drops. The tanker was right behind me, and we were on short final, when it happened. I never saw them... the tanker guy right on my butt said they would have taken off the tail of the Baron. He just happened to catch a flash, and he just screamed "TURN! NOW!" and I was so shocked and so startled, I just rolled hard left. Thanks to the slippery little Baron, we all missed each other. We came around, did the drop, reported it on the radio, went back to base, and I was in much more of a daze than the tanker captain, who was positively going to go find whomever was in that "%^%#%^^^ airplane", and kill them with his bare hands. Which seemed like a very nice idea, to me. "Yup.. sounds good." And boy, this guy could have done it in about 2 seconds.
They had been told our victor frequency, but were just listening to their own frequenecy. They knew what they did, but never did contact us or apologize, or anything. They flew back to their airport and so the murder never took place, but boy, I have no doubt it would have.
There are too many instances of being "surprised" like this... as Jim and Mike and all the other fire guys know all too well. Last summer we even had some idiot who kept trying to circle right at the edge of the column, but he sure picked the bad side, and so about got run over by it. I called the military guys we were flight-following with, told him we had a single-engine low-wing and he needed to get the HELL OUT NOW. The controller got on and harped at an airplane (whom he had been talking to earlier and felt could only be the same guy). We never heard any response, but suddenly the guy flew away. Grrr-rrrrr.
So... I still love that tanker pilot.
