What’s coming up and blog cleaning

I have been writing this blog on aerial wild land firefighting and related issues for the last seven years. It is inevitable that links will be outdated and videos are removed from youtube or networks and other media outlets remove the videos and I edit the article. In a couple of cases, I have to delete the article because the article no longer makes sense.  Just the other day, I spent a couple of hours doing these edits and realized that it is time to write current updates of some articles. For example, I wrote an article a few years ago on smoke jumper history and because most of the links are outdated, I had to severely scale down the article. It is still there, but I am going to work on an update. Finally I had to delete another article on smokejumper history with an outdated link to a video from 1949 on smokejumping, I am going to look around for that video and if I find it I'll include it in an upcoming article on smokejumper history.

I will also take a look at the article that I have written on retardant and foam to see if the links still work and ascertain if it is time for updated articles. 

Then there are a series of articles on Aero Union and Evergreen in early 2009. Many of you will recall that the USFS terminated it’s contract with Aero Union four years ago with Aero Union going out of business a few months later (see my articles of July 30, 2011, August 17, 2011, and January 18, 2012) I am leaving the articles from 2009 on Aero Union’s Lockheed P-3 tankers up because of their important contribution to aerial wild land firefighting, but have added an annotation about the termination of the contract in 2011.

In early 2009, Evergreen had a 747 tanker capable of dropping 20,000 gallons of retardant. My understanding is that the 747 tanker is no longer configured for aerial firefighting. I did have to delete one article on the 747 tanker because the article no long made sense after deleting outdated links. But I will leave the remaining articles up with an annotation that according to Bill Gabbert's May 2nd (2014) article on Fire Aviation it seems that Evergreen has declared bankruptcy.

Over the next few weeks I will be working on revisions to articles on smoke jumper history and retardant and foam. I will be looking at other articles that may need revising over the next few months. I will continue to make edits on older articles and as applicable as applicable including but along the lines of the annotations that I just made to articles on Aero Union’s P-3’s and the Evergreen 747 tanker.