Rudy Billberg: B-25 air tankers in Alaska (1960s)

In my lead in to this series of articles on the B-25, I mentioned that my inspiration this series was reading a book by Rudy Billberg, In the Shadow of Eagles: From Barnstormer to Alaska Bush Pilot, A Flyer's Story. Rudy, born in 1916, grew up and learned to fly in northern Minnesota. If you read his book than you will know how true it is when he writes of his journey as an aviator from barnstorming to being a bush pilot in Alaska. Among other things he spent a few summers in the 1960s flying B-25's fire tankers for the Bureau of Land Management in Alaska.

I got to know the B-25 through Rudy's writing of summers flying B-25 tankers. By the time he flew the B-25 air tanker, I think that he had been flying for almost thirty years. He also spent at least one summer flying Smokejumpers in a DC-3. Rudy has this way of making many of the planes he flew "come alive." And his writing about the B-25 was no exception:

It was a thrill to fly the B-25. When empty, that airplane performed like no other (Billberg, 248).

He goes on to talk about the process of dumping borate (the retardant that he used). Borate was heavy, about 11 pounds per gallon. The tank capacity on the B-25 was 1,000 gallons for a total load of 11,000 pounds. Speaking of borate, he says:

This is much heavier than the 3,000 pound bomb load the airplane was designed to carry. ... Flying this overload would have been extremely dangerous except for one thing: if an engine failed, even during takeoff, the borate could be dumped in six seconds. (Billberg, 249).

He goes on to talk about drops on a fire:

When dumping borate on a forest fire, I had to really be on my toes, for I commonly had to fly as low as 200 feet. The fire was often on a hillside, in a hole, or in a mountain valley. Two possibilities that I always had to keep in mind were engine failure and gate failure. ... Sometimes I circled a fire for 20 minutes or more figuring out how to get out of a run if an engine or a gate failed. It was the kind of flying that took all the forethought and concentration I could muster. (Billberg, 249-50).

Note: The B-25 tankers flew for only a couple of seasons in the lower 48 before being permanently withdrawn from service for safety considerations. In addition to their service in Alaska, the Canadians used B-25 tankers until the early 1990s.

Billgerg, Rudy (as told to Jim Rearden). 1992 (third edition 1999). In the Shadow of Eagles: From Barnstormer to Alaska Bush Pilot, A Flyer's Story. Anchorage AK: Alaska Northway Books.