Marine Helos fighting (May 2014) San Diego County Wildfires

I ran across a nice video the other day of Marine Helicopters working the May 2014 wildfires in San Diego County, California (see my May 15, 2014 article and Bill Gabbert's May 18, 2014 article). I really liked this video because I got to see a variety of military helicopters that I don't normally get to see.

I wanted some help to confirm the type of helicopter that you see in the opening shots of the video, so I asked a good friend who worked with helicopters to help. He is busy, but took a few moments to watch the video. Thank-you!! As I suspected, my friend told me that the helicopter that you see in the opening shots of this video is a Boeing Vertol CH-46 Sea Knight, the civilian version is the Boeing-Vertol 107 IIs. In 2009, I wrote a couple of articles on the Boeing Vertol 107.

My friend went on to offer his best identification of some of the other helicopters in the video (I am not sure where in the video you see them): Bell Super Cobra, Bell Twin Huey, and Sikorsky CH-53 Super Stallion. The links that I included here are the best that I could do to offer some information (from wikipedia) on what could be these three helicopters.

In any event, I enjoyed watching all the helicopters in the video. You will also see hot reloading of fuel at Camp Pendleton, where I believe that fuel is reloaded while the engine is running.


direct link to video