Oshkosh and Canadian Fire Smoke

[Hector]

Wisconsin is seeing a lot of Canadian smoke from the wild fires. A friend there says it’s really mostly IFR even when the METAR says is VFR. You can see vertically down more or less ok but forward visibility through the smoke is less than 2 miles. I can’t imagine the impact this will have on Oshkosh if things don’t improve significantly by then. Has there been any discussion from EAA on plans on how to deal with this?

 

 

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[Danb]

I flew from Detroit to Delaware on Wednesday 1 mile visibility could see straight down, shot RNAV approach and didn’t see runway until 600. Next day was worse. Firesmoke.ca gives an outlook by the hour for say 36 hours of the whole North American. Check it out. If I go this year, I just rented car in Green Bay I’m not flying into Oshkosh due the risk of smoke even 4 miles vis is not much in the Congo line 

[Hector]

I flew from Detroit to Delaware on Wednesday 1 mile visibility could see straight down, shot RNAV approach and didn’t see runway until 600. Next day was worse. Firesmoke.ca gives an outlook by the hour for say 36 hours of the whole North American. Check it out. If I go this year, I just rented car in Green Bay I’m not flying into Oshkosh due the risk of smoke even 4 miles vis is not much in the Congo line 

Thanks for the website. That will prove handy. I think it’s a nightmare scenario with hundreds of aircraft converging in small area with very limited visibility. Hope that is not the case but many of the Canadian fires are being left to burn themselves out and that could take a while.


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[aviatoreb]

I flew yesterday in smoke that called itself 4mi viz which on ifr approach seemed a lot lower.  Are the visibility reporting devices calibrated properly for smoke?  Or are they mostly accurate only for moisture?

[aviatoreb]

1 hour ago, M20Doc said:

On the advice of a famous Floridian, we’re going the start raking the leaves in our forests next year.

I know - that famous advice....has occurred to me a few times in the last weeks.  Good luck with that!

[A64Pilot]

On 7/2/2023 at 7:04 AM, M20Doc said:

On the advice of a famous Floridian, we’re going the start raking the leaves in our forests next year.

Took me a minute to figure that out as I’ve not heard it.

There are more forest fires in the SouthEast US than any other part of the US, but they don’t get bad because we control burn frequently. The SE has huge mostly planted pine forests that are grown for lumber and as such are managed, hence the controlled burning. But that’s pretty recent, last 50 years or so.

It didn’t used to be that way, in the 60’s there were fire towers everywhere and forest dept offices in every little small town that had JD-450 bulldozers on trucks that would scramble like WWII fighters and go out and put fire breaks around the fire and it would burn out. That’s changed now, the towers are abandoned and all those trucks and bulldozers are mostly gone. When I was young there were some huge fires in the Okefenokee and I believe it’s controlled burned now as well as the Everglades, but they didn’t used to be, only pretty recently.

Somewhat interesting is we learned to control burn from the Indians, once we listened  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_use_of_fire_in_ecosystems

When I was first stationed at Ft Hood Yellowstone caught fire in a MAJOR way, FT Hood was emptied of all its Blackhawks and Chinooks to fight the fire and thousands of Federal troops. The park had for decades had its fires put out and the fuel continued to build up until eventually there was enough for it to be essentially unstoppable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellowstone_fires_of_1988

California was among the last to start control burning, I’ve heard but cannot verify that it’s partially due to environmental concerns over some insect.

I was involved somewhat in the SEAT program (single engine air tankers) basically modified crop dusters, my belief is that there is an unbelievable amount of money spent each year fighting wild fires and therefore a large contingent of people and even business that don’t want their cash cow to go away, so they fight controlled burning.

Control burning besides preventing huge fires returns the minerals etc to the soil, cleans out the undergrowth and as it’s small fires it doesn’t hurt the trees, in the managed lumber forests of the SE it makes money to control burn, besides protecting the trees they grow quicker from being fertilized and they undergrowth doesn’t sap the minerals it all goes to the trees.

Bottom line, your going to have a fire, it’s inevitable and it’s been that way for Centuries, but you can choose to have numerous small fires or one big forest destroying fire once in a while. 

I’d bet that was his comment but of course politics being what they are there is some sound bite that’s taken out of context. Not having heard it, but I’d bet he was saying you rake with fire as we do in the South East.

But many of us in the SEAT program felt that the huge forest and home destroying fires in California etc will continue until controlled burning becomes common place.

We are going to have to do what the Native Americans apparently did for generations.

What’s tough of course is to begin control burning when there hasn’t been a fire for decades as the fuel build up is large, you have to be very careful and sometimes no matter how careful you are one gets away from you, until you have a program established.

On edit, Google “does Canada control burn its forests” or similar and do some reading, I won’t post links because I’m sure many are political leaning and frankly I don’t know which ones are, but there is some interesting reading from what I hope aren’t all politically motivated.

Edited July 5, 2023 by A64Pilot

[Dick Denenny]

I have always found the older Ted Talk fascinating.