Fighting forest fires in FSX

As proposed in another thread I went ahead and implemented an addon that allows you to fight fires. It generates fires in a certain radius around your position. These fires have a lifecycle, they grow and spread (and die when everything flammable is burned out or if they meet a non-flammable landclass). You can fly to these fires and put them out by "releasing droppable objects" on them. Dropping agent on them will not just switch them off, the fires have a certain size and intensity so you may need multiple trips (and when you fly to and fro the fire may start spreading again). Fires of course create variable updrafts over their position, so flying above them is no easy feat. Everything will be fully configurable, so the user can tweak any kind of aspect to his/her liking.

The great achilles heel of course is sim performance. Once the number of fire elementals reaches a certain amount, your FPS get shot dead. These particle effects are very expensive. The hard part will be to find the correct parameters in the profile so your system can cope.

Anyway, the app is coming along nicely but I would like some real world input to make this experience plausible.

- What kind of fire extinguishing agents are there?

-- how are they dropped (all at once, multiple single drops)?

-- at what altitude?

-- how would one classify their effectiveness?

--- evaporation during drop,

--- spreading out with horizontal speed

--- spreading out/losing effectiveness with drop height

-- how would these agents classify in handling:

--- time to refill a certain amount

--- weight

--- volume of the tanks

--- amount contained in a single release

- What would be a believable updraft over a fire in feet/second and to what altitude would it reach?

- What would be a believable safe altitude above a fire of what size, and what would happen if you fly below that? Happen in terms of FSX - I was thinking of spawning engine fires and if possible up the OAT/TAT.

- Can anyone recommend a good freeware water bomber for testing purposes?

- Are there optimized fire/burnt/steam effects around to replace the stock fx_forestfire-...?

As for project status:

- The fire spawing, lifecycle and spreading are done

- Updraft and minimum safe altitude are implemented

- The first crude implementation of water bombing is done

I estimate the GUI will be pretty much finished by the weekend.

They drop water and they drop retardant but they don't do the same thing with both. From my observation water is generally dropped directly on the fire, retardant is generally laid out in a swath between the fire and houses/communities and generally only used when houses are threatened. Retardant isn't used to actually put the fires out, it's used as a barrier. They use big planes for retardant drops (a DC-10!) and smaller planes (Air Tractors) and helis for water drops.

There's some great footage of the big tankers doing retardant drops here:

http://www.kxly.com/news/north-idaho-news/record-amount-of-retatdant-dropped-on-regional-wildfires/34980588

There's a freeware DC-10 in the file library from Thomas Ruth.

Also I started a thread here that might be of interest, we were already brainstorming this a little:

http://www.fsdeveloper.com/forum/threads/just-a-fun-thing-for-the-gis-types-wildfires.434917/

I'm still working on perimeters and FIRMS satellite hot spot (fire effect placements from satellite data) but we were thinking about trying a mission where you leave KMWH in a DC-10 and fly up to Kettle Falls where you drop a load of retardant between the Renner Lake fire and the Matsen Creek community. I don't know if that mission is truly accurate, I don't know which aircraft were used, someone said a 707 but I can't see where any 707s have been converted for retardant drops so I think they probably saw the DC-10 and called it a 707. I do know Matsen Creek was in Stage III evacuation on approx 8/21 and they did drop retardant to save houses.

EDIT: This is updated dynamically and we finally got some rain a week or so ago so fires are slowly being removed now but here are the active fires in the Northwest I'm working on, basically everything in Washington state at this point, zoom in and you can see the fire perimeters, Renner Lake is in the "Kettle Complex":

http://gacc.nifc.gov/nwcc/interactivemap/index.html?webmap=ed0a7dad32fe4848b20c6f91c74c79ea

Hi Jim,

good point, laying the barriers. Not a problem I think, I could generate blocking/retarding elementals too. A real problem is the sheer size the fires might get if you do not put them out. Too large a fire means 8 FPS or lower compared to 120 (windowed mode) when the fires were just spawned.

And thanks for the link, some good ideas. Contrary to most approaches with missions my app is completely dynamic. It is an EXE running alongside the sim and it is using SimConnect for the fire simulation and the bombing part.

Drop me a note if you'd like to try it out - but I still need a couple of evenings for the GUI I'm afraid, so it is still very basic.

Wish you well Jim, and lots of drabby weather!

il88pp.

They drop water and they drop retardant but they don't do the same thing with both. From my observation water is generally dropped directly on the fire, retardant is generally laid out in a swath between the fire and houses/communities and generally only used when houses are threatened. Retardant isn't used to actually put the fires out, it's used as a barrier. They use big planes for retardant drops (a DC-10!) and smaller planes (Air Tractors) and helis for water drops.

Some can also take water and mix it with chemical agents as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombardier_415

Wish you well Jim, and lots of drabby weather!

il88pp.

Thanks mate, I've gotten close to an inch of rain since 8/29 and temps have dropped into the 50s and 60s so no worries at the moment. I think we're done with the heat so I should be in the clear now. There were a few days there though... :)

nuitkati that looks awesome, I see you've got some thermals coming up out of the fires, that should be quite a ride, lol! Can you make that thing load fire coords from a .csv in decimal degrees? Maybe if the .csv was trimmed down to just a dozen placements or so? I'm thinking this .csv could be supplied with a saved flight/mission where you load the flight in the sim and then load the .csv into your utility to set up the target fires? I'll send you a PM.

I didn't know they could mix chemicals with water "on-site" like that, it must be some pretty concentrated stuff if they haul it around with them?

I was reading a little about this crop duster turned fire fighter here also:

http://www.airtractor.com/aircraft/802f-fire-boss

To me that seems like the most efficient way to put a heck of a lot of water on the fire in a hurry providing there was a suitable water body very close by. I don't see the "buy now" button on the page, I guess if I have to ask I probably can't afford it, right? :)

Couple shots of the Wolverine fire near Chelan, I just added this one yesterday:

http://www.cat-tamer.com/flightsim/atchmnts/wolverine03.jpg

http://www.cat-tamer.com/flightsim/atchmnts/wolverine01.jpg

So now for the state of WA I have the following fires in the sim.

Carpenter Road

Chelan Complex

-First Creek

-Reach

Kaniksu Complex

-Tower

-Baldy

Kettle Complex

-Stickpin

-Graves Mtn.

-Renner Lake

-Roy Road

Okanogan Complex

-Lime Belt

-Tunk Block

-Twisp River

-9-mile (not finished)

North Star

Wolverine

The .infs are all set up for each individual fire and perimeter blend masks can be generated from .shp files available from USGS for any available date so you can see the fires one day, swap out some .bgls and fly it again the next day to see the growth. The fire effect placements are from a huge .csv I got from NASA covering the month of August, they use effectParams="MOY=08,08;DOM=nn,nn;" in the placements so they're conditionally visible depending on what date you set in the sim.

Hello @ll,

the GUI is pretty much finished now.

Next step is refining the fire simulation and spawning. It is already aware of the wind, but I need to juggle the probabilities a bit so that the fires do not get out of hand so fast. But you can drop the defined amount of payload on the fire and it will put some of it out until your tank is empty. Then you have to return to your refill point (=the initial position when you first spawned) or, if your plane can do this, you land on or fly over water very low (less than 10 feet) and top off pretty quickly (the CL215 scoops 5 tons of water in 12 seconds...).

@Jim

The import of RW data is definitely on my list. I will look into it tomorrow. My initial thought was XML though, as this is a small piece of OOP. The main object structure is the "Fire" itself, having a certain spawning point in lat/lon. The "Fire" consists of "Elementals" that are growing,shrinking and spawning themselves according to wind and weather (rain does not help this...).

So I plan to build an XML structure where you define the "Fire" and inside it any number of "Elementals". You need to be conservative though, a fire with 100 Elementals will be a slideshow in the sim.

Here some current screenshots.

Hi @ll,

my addon is pretty much finished, beta test will start tomorrow. Just need to finish the documentation.

This addon puts you in a completely dynamic environment, where fires live and grow, are aware of wind and precipitation, generate updrafts and general mayhem.

• Spawn fires randomly or in any specific place you like.
  
• Watch them grow and multiply themselves
  
• Jump into your water bomber and do something about it!
  
• Survive the nasty updrafts.
  
• Keep your distance – fly too low and suffer the consequences
  
• Use any plane you like to fight the fires
  
• Refill your tanks at the airport
  
• Scoop water from water bodies near you
  
• Battle the effects of weight shift when dropping a few tons of water from your fuselage
  
• Tweak any aspect of the fire and retardant drop simulation to your liking
  
• Save or load settings profiles
  
• Save or load fire situations
  

Anyone interested in testing please drop me a note.

--- the Canadair CL-215 is the freeware model available online ---

Hi,

It is the first time that I read this post.

I am very interresting to test your app.

I lead the Groupe415, a team flying CL-415v2 in her multi-role function.

Jean-Pierre Fillion

Groupe415

Québec