Having grown up within miles from John F. Kennedy Airport, I eagerly awaited the opportunity to visit and stay at the newly renovated TWA Hotel on location at JFK airport.

The TWA Hotel opened in May of 2019 following a two year $265 million restoration of the Eero Saarinen TWA Flight Center which was first built in 1962. The flight center building is now the lobby of the 512 room TWA hotel. One of the hotels top features is a rooftop infinity pool and observation deck containing lounges and cocktail bar. In addition, the hotel has a sunken cocktail lounge in the lobby, and the Paris Café restaurant. One other outstanding attraction within the hotel premises is a cocktail bar located inside a decommissioned Lockheed Constellation.

For aviation enthusiasts the observation deck offers a p...

P-2V Neptune at Alamogordo New Mexico

Aerial Firefighting has changed in many ways during the past 90 years or so, since its inception here in the U.S.. In other ways it hasn’t changed very much. Let’s look back a few decades…

Coulson’s Martin Mars unloads during a demo at EAA AirVenture

Delivery of water or other liquids from an aircraft is still the preferred method of fighting a fire from the air, but other aerial applications have arrived within the last half century. The employment of smokejumpers with a limited, but very useful amount of equipment has been a notable accomplishment in fighting fires from the air. Aircraft for reconnaissance and lead planes that help tankers drop with improved precision are now an integral part of an air attack on a major fire.

As far as liquids be...

This is the first part of two… looking at current and past aerial firefighting machines.

Aerial firefighting is a crucial asset and a dangerous job; a recent event in in Australia showed the worst case during an already tragic bushfire season in that country. A Coulson Aviation C-130 aerial tanker crashed while on a firefighting mission, tragically killing its three person crew.

10 Tanker DC-10 unloads fire retardant near a blaze

The use of aerial platforms to help fight and/or contain a large land fire has roots that go as far back as the late 1920s in the United States, although the 1950’s saw widespread use of systems that are basically still in use today.

Piston-engine P-2V Neptune anti-submarine/patrol bombers have recently been retired

Original air tankers – which were usually s...