KEY POINTS:
William Cleary believes aerial firefighting could become child's play.
Five years ago, his son drenched him with a water balloon - and got him thinking.
"He was three stories up and I was walking and he still managed hit me square in the head," said the Boeing engineer. "I thought, why can't we be this accurate with water on fires?"
So he started working on a system to use giant water balloons to put out wildfires. Now, after winning research funding, Cleary has a shared patent and a small team of designers and engineers at his disposal on a project that could change the way fires are fought from the air.
It involves biodegradable plastic balloons 1.2m in diameter holding 908 litres of water. They are enclosed in cardboard boxes that are torn open by the wind when pushed out the back of a cargo plane. The balloons burst in midair. With the use of GPS co-ordinates and wind-speed calculations, the balloons could be dropped with precision from a safe altitude high above the flames.
The system has evolved over five years from hard plastic beachball-size balloons to the enormous water bladders made by Flexible Alternatives which also makes the straps that attach to the box lid and pull the balloon apart. Paper products giant Weyerhaeuser designed the corrugated cardboard container that prevents the balloons from leaking or sloshing around in a plane's cargo hold.
The water balloons could make any plane with a ramp, a cargo bay, and a specialised GPS system into a firefighter. A C-130 cargo plane, which the United States Air National Guard uses to drop supplies, could fit 16 balloons - 14,384 litres of water or fire retardant - per trip.
The system is ready to be tested on a real fire on private land. The Government requires extensive testing before new firefighting technology can be used on federal land.
- AP
