Conair Aviation has a new water bomber. At the moment it's flying in Australia for the fire season, but soon enough it'll come home.

There are BAe 146 kits in 1/144 from Revell and Welsh, and in 1/72 Welsh has announced a kit to be released this year.

Interesting. But why does a Canadian company have its aircraft registered on the U.S. This aircraft is not listed on their website yet so it must be new to the fleet. Their other air tanker the Convair CV580 looks like a good conversion from the Cosmopolitan CC109 I am using for the Vac and Resin campaign.

Apparently it's intended for use in the US, and so is registered accordingly.

Neptune Aviation is currently flying 4 of them and was just awarded a contract with the U.S.F.S. to get 7 more. Current fleet is 4 BAe-146's and 6 Lockheed P2V's.

http://www.neptuneaviation.com/index2.php#/rtext_3/





See ya in the funnies..............

That conversion looks much less extreme than the Conair one. I assume that the tanks are inside the former passenger area on that one.

Hey Jesse,

Found these.





Interior shot



And some other converts to think about............









See ya in the funnies...................

I have a feeling that interior shot is the Neptune one, because the Conair obviously wears its tanks on the outside, blocking the windows.

Not exactly Jessica,

The photo caption read "RJ85 and BAe 146 interior." I'm not sure why the reinforcement is needed for the RJ85, maybe it carries a larger payload then what is shown or it has a different firefighting system in use that needs to extra space. Those could be mixing tanks for the fire retardant.

I'll have to find the photo again.

See ya in the funnies...............

O.K., I found it!

You'll have to scroll all the way down to see the outside shot. However, there are other bits on the aircraft.

Article here: http://fireaviation.com/tag/aero-flite/page/2/

See ya in the funnies..............

Nobody does a Q400 in 1/72, but there's always the nifty Nazca kit in 1/144