Billings Flying Service: CH-47 Helicopter

Direct link to video from Billings Flying Service on YouTube

I got interested in posting about the CH-47 helicopter when I came across a video by Earl Watters, a helicopter pilot for Billings Flying Service on Facebook a couple of weeks ago. In this video, which I will share later, Earl shares about Boomer, the CH-47 he flies. I contacted him and he gave me permission to share this video with you. In the meantime I checked out Billings Flying Service and liked the details that they provided on their webpage. For example, go to their home page where you will find the video that I embedded at the beginning of this post. Billings provides some good information about their fleet of helicopters: CH-47, Bell 206 and UH-60A. In fairness, I should note hear that there are other aviation companies that fly CH-47 helicopters such as Coulson Aviation USA.

Just today thanks to a May 16th article on Aerial Fire about Earl Watters and Boomer and that linked  to a short article from B105, The Northlands #1 for New Country. When I went to the B105 article about Boomer and Earl in early May I found some good information about Boomer and a little information about Earl. You will see a couple of videos of drops that Boomer made on a couple of wildfires in Minnesota in May. This article states that that it takes only 40 seconds for Boomer to fill up with 2,300 gallons of water, going on to say that Boomer has to refuel after two hours of flying. Earl contacted me to clarify Boomer's fuel consumption, Boomer consumes 50 pounds a fuel a minute (not 50 gallons).

Prior to writing this post, I checked my blog to see what other articles I had written about the CH-47 and found my November 18th 2022 post on the CH-47 with some of the same information about Billings that I used here. In addition, if you go that post, you will see a five minute from Earl Watters about aerial firefighting with a  Billings CH-47. Take a few minutes to go and watch the video.

Some information  from Billings on CH-47 performance and stats, go here for more details

• Range: 360 nautical miles
• Fuel burn: 340 GPH (gallons per hour)
• Cruise speed: 140 knot
• Maximum hook weight: 26,000 pounds
• Maximum engine horsepower for each engine: 5,000 hp

Billings CH-47 for aerial firefighting, go here for more details (with video)

• Buckets: 2,700 gallons maximum capacity, full load release in three seconds
• CH-47D tanks: 2,500 gallon capacity, fill rate of 4,000 gallons per minute. full load release in three seconds

Here is Earl Watters in his Facebook video from May discussing the performance of Boomer, the Billings CH-47 he flies.