30 



Chairman Hansen. But you don't envision the Forest Service ac- 

 tually having its own fleet of tankers. 



Under Secretary Lyons. No, we would not want to do that. 



Chairman HANSEN. So you either want help from the military or 

 you want the military to have the right to sell older tankers to 

 commercial people that you can then contract with. Is that what 

 you have in mind? 



Under Secretary LYONS. That would be what we would propose. 



Chairman Hansen. What kind of tankers would you have in 

 mind? I mean you see everything from P-3s to old DC-6s up and 

 down the Wasatch front, and I've thought it has been an air show 

 for the last three months. Every time I turn around there is an old 

 Korean dog, and I really enjoy watching them all go by, or lumber- 

 ing by, and that's tough flying. What kind of aircraft do you envi- 

 sion that the military now has that can swoop down in these gul- 

 lies with the temperature at 105 degrees and just right off the deck 

 almost drop your load and get out of there safely? What do you 

 have in mind? 



Under Secretary Lyons. Well it's C-130's and P-3s primarily. 



Chairman Hansen. And the Lockheed P-3. 



Under Secretary Lyons. Correct. Those, at least experience has 

 shown, have served best in terms of being retrofit for retardant 

 loads and fighting wildfire, and we have contractors with experi- 

 ence in doing those conversions which is what makes them so good. 



Chairman Hansen. I haven't seen your legislation, and I sit both 

 on the Armed Services Committee and the Resource Committee, 

 and let me respectfully say that with three crammed weeks coming 

 up I wouldn't bet the farm on it that any one of those are ever 

 going to make it and I don't think you've got a prayer. I probably 

 would agree with you in how these aircraft become available, and 

 of course they've got to be relatively good aircraft, especially when 

 you're low and slow. That makes you kind of nervous when you're 

 flying junk to go up and down these canyons, if I may respectfully 

 say so. 



Under Secretary LYONS. Well, as you know, it's not the farm, but 

 it's the forests we're worried about, and maybe we could sit down 

 and talk about a way to get this done. It's an important issue. 



Chief Thomas. If I could make a 



Chairman Hansen. There's a possibility, and excuse me, Chief, 

 but I think there's a possibility it can be done without the legisla- 

 tion because I've sure seen a lot of it end up in the hands of other 

 people. 



Chief. 



Chief Thomas. Well we've had enough trouble over the past 

 three or four years with airtankers that I would like a nice clean 

 situation where we don't have to be questioned about what we've 

 done because it's our responsibility to have their airtankers up. 



And you're certainly correct, we've got two problems. One is 

 those are old airplanes and they're getting older. We've got a loss 

 rate of about three percent a year, and that seems pretty low, but 

 as those of us approaching your age or mine you know that your 

 loss rate gets higher as the aircraft or the human being gets older. 

 And certainly we are approaching a point where we've cannibalized 

 all the parts we can cannibalize. Those airplanes are old and we 



