Kawak: Innovating From Start To Finish

The Cascade fire bucket has a unique shape. How does this affect the drop pattern and flight characteristics?

That’s two of the most important things that customers talk to us about.

In order to be effective, a bucket has to fly well under and behind the aircraft; both empty and full. This shape actually flies extremely well and part of the reason for that is not just the shape, it’s the fact that most of the weight is in the bottom of the bucket. Not only that but when you drop it into the dip, the valve opens automatically and it just sinks straight into the water. With some other types of buckets that are more of an hourglass shape, you have to tilt the bucket over and drag it in order to get it to fill; you don’t have to do that with the Cascade. The other reason for the shape is that you get tremendous head column, so the drop pattern is dense and it’s good for penetrating canopies. You get a lot of head pressure out of the bucket when you make the drop.

The Cascade also has an innovative valve to allow a rapid fill. Was this consideration planned from the start in the design process?

Yes, almost from the beginning. Kawak have been in the firefighting market for years with our snorkel pumps and our tank systems, and we’re fairly widely acknowledged to have one of, if not the, best pump systems in the market. A lot of the medium Bell tank systems out there all retrofit our pump onto it because it’s faster, more efficient, and extremely reliable. Even other existing power filled buckets often retrofit our pump because it’s very reliable and the fastest on the market.

One of the early design criteria was to incorporate our pump system and our knowledge of that into this power fill bucket. It’s a 1,600gal per minute pump, so it will fill a 900gal bucket in less than 40 seconds. As any operator will tell you, the faster and easier you can get in and out of the dip site, the safer it is. Furthermore, you only need about 18 inches of water to fill it. One of the other design criteria that we had for the bucket was that it needed to be rugged, needed to be reliable, and it needed to be easily maintained in the field. Those are really important things to our customer base for all our products, not just the bucket. The linear actuator that’s on it can be removed with three bolts if you should have a problem with it. We have run one of these second generation actuators for 130,000 cycles in our facility with no failures.

The rigging on the bucket is synthetic and stronger than steel. What made Kawak go with this design choice?

Credit goes to our engineering team on that, they were forward thinking and they said that we don’t have to go with wire rope, like everybody else uses. I came from the operator industry, years ago we switched over to all synthetic long lines and, essentially, the material that we’re using is a miniature version of a synthetic long line. It’s all woven, it’s got Kevlar fibers and it’s very strong. One of those six ropes alone will hold the weight of the whole bucket, so the safety margin is extreme. They’re stronger, they’re lighter, and they’re much easier to handle for ground crews.

As well as the innovative rigging, We are having these skins custom made for us by Canflex. They’re a company up in Anacortes, Washington. They manufacture these extremely large fuel and water bladders for remote site operations in the Arctic, so they have a high degree of expertise with all types of skin material and with state-of-the-art laser welding. All the seams on this bucket are laser welded, which is incredibly strong.

What other innovations do Kawak develop that aid aerial firefighters in their operations?

A big part of our business is tank systems. We design and manufacture the tank and retractable snorkel system that is fitted to every Sikorsky Firehawk. Cal Fire has thirteen of those aircraft and we’re building more tanks for them this year. Los Angeles County, San Diego County, Ventura County, and Santa Barbara County all fly Kawak tanks on Firehawks. That tank is extremely rugged; it’s built to be a 20-year tank. It has a door and water evacuation system that creates an extremely dense effective drop pattern. And it has a pretty nifty retractable snorkel system so they can fly it true full cruise speed. It only takes about five seconds to deploy the snorkel in the dip site, then it takes about 40 seconds to fill the 1,000gal tank and then they can retract the snorkel and fly away at full cruise. A lot of aircraft with dangling snorkels are usually air speed restricted. We are looking forward to building more of those. We’re looking at doing some work that will eventually make that tank system available to commercial operators, not just agencies.

We also build the internal tank system for Billings Flying Service for its CH-47 Chinook. That system has got some unique features. It has been very finely engineered to create a very effective drop pattern through the hook well, with a unique set of doors meaning that you can still utilize the hook system. Plus, it’s got a very specialized and very powerful hydraulic snorkel system on it, a true 4,000gal per minute snorkel system; the fastest snorkel system available for a CH-47.