Bystander Captures Water Plane Hitting Dock Post While Scooping Water For Last Week’s Fires

A Dangerous Job.

As fires have been raging in multiple places in France over the past month, a fleet of Canadair “Super Scoopers” has been working tirelessly to try to contain, if not extinguish, the flames. These planes can scoop up over 1,500 gallons of water from water surfaces and use it in firefighting efforts. They can also be loaded with fire retardant foam as well, but scooping water is a lot faster. In this case, time is of the essence.

The job, as you can imagine, is quite dangerous. Not only do you have to perform touch and goes with the belly of your plane, but you then have to fly into smoke filled areas of woodlands to strategically drop the water. It’s not a job for amateur pilots for sure and as you’ll see in this video, even professionals make mistakes.

Here’s the video from last month’s firefighting effort that went smoothly. It also covers the story of what is happening in more detail.

The uploader, Isabelle Blache, wrote in the description of the video that there was physical damage to the plane but no one was injured both in the plane and on the dock/pier. We don’t know whether the takeoff was aborted or not, which is something that we’d really want to know. The video, unfortunately, cuts off right after impact.

We’re guessing they didn’t just to be safe but then again, they have an extremely important job to do. What do you think, just for the sake of discussion?