Greek Water Pilot Pdf
Rebbeca Schulke
European aerial firefighting rescue services have been hard pressed this summer, with hot and dry regions around the Mediterranean seeing record temperatures. Greece is no exception, with a solid force of aircraft and helicopters working hard during the summer months. Peter Ten Berg spoke to Hellenic Air Force Major Petros Kazakos about the fleet.
Major Petros Kazakos, one of the Dromader pilots, spoke to AirMed&Rescue in April, before the heat of the summer reached the Southern Mediterranean nation. It is almost the end of the off-season, just before the aircraft will spread out over the country for their summer detachments from May to October. This is a very busy period for the unit, as final maintenance is carried out on the aircraft, pilots are doing their last training sorties, and the squadron is making the final preparations for their summer deployments.
The squadron has 21 aircraft, 18 PZL M-18B single seaters, and three PZL M-18BS double seaters for pilot training. The Dromaders were built by the Polish PZL-Mielec aircraft plant, currently part of Sikorsky Aircraft Company and delivered in 1983. The aircraft are equipped with a single rotary piston PZL-KALISZ model Asz-621-M18 engine, giving the aircraft 967 horsepower and a top speed of 228 kmph.
Major Kazakos also mentions that the Hellenic Dromaders are different to those from other operators as they were modified by 359 MAEDY, who installed a hydraulic water drop hatch instead of a mechanical one. This provided the pilots with the extra option of releasing the water over a three-to-12-second time frame, instead of all at once. Furthermore, by installing a foam generator in the water tank, the pilots were given a selection of tools with which to fight fires.
The Dromaders have an airborne response time of 15 minutes, during which time the pilot makes a provisional flight plan towards the reported fire location. Ground crew fill the water tank shortly before take off to save the aircraft frame from being exposed to a continuous high waterload for an unnecessarily long time. A portable GPS is used to reach the fire location.
Once on scene, the pilots first fly an orbit above the fire location to orientate on wind direction, identify obstacles such as electric cables and pylons, and examine area height differences in order to determine the right approach from which to attack the fire. The minimum height where the pilots drop their water load is 10 metres, which gives them enough altitude to avoiding flying through smoke fumes and to keep a smoke-free view.
Inspired by the dynamics of aviation and a passion for photography, Peter accompanies aircraft and helicopter crews to capture them at work and hear their story for his exclusive reports. His focus is on military aviation as well as governmental subjects including HEMS, SAR, UAV and rescue.
A Canadian-built plane fighting wildfires in Greece crashed on Tuesday, as Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis warned of tough days ahead, with blazes destroying homes and forcing the evacuation of thousands of tourists from the island of Rhodes.
Video from state-owed ERT TV showed the bright yellow aircraft releasing its load of water before its wingtip apparently snagged a tree branch. Moments later it disappeared into a deep fold in the ground from which a fireball erupted. The plane had no ejection system.
Mitsotakis cancelled a planned visit to Cyprus for Wednesday, and Greece's armed forces declared three days of mourning. "They offered their lives to save lives," Mitsotakis said of the pilots. "They proved how hazardous their daily missions in extinguishing fires are ... In their memory, we continue the war against the destructive forces of nature."
A third successive heat wave in Greece pushed temperatures back above 40 C across parts of the country Tuesday amid a string of evacuations from fires that have raged out of control for days, whipped on by strong winds.
It's still unclear how they started, although tinder-dry conditions amid the summer heat mean the slightest spark can trigger a blaze that will spread fast if not quickly quenched. Several people have been arrested or fined across Greece in recent days for accidentally starting fires.
"All of us are standing guard," he said. "In the face of what the entire planet is facing, especially the Mediterranean, which is a climate change hot spot, there is no magical defence mechanism. If there was, we would have implemented it."
An assessment by scientists published Tuesday said human-induced climate change has played an "absolutely overwhelming" role in the extreme heat waves that have swept across North America, southern Europe and China this month.
In Greece, a prosecutor on Rhodes launched an investigation into the causes of the fires and the preparedness and response of authorities, ERT said. It said about 10 per cent of the island's land area had burned.
More than 2,000 vacationers had returned home by plane on Monday and tour operators cancelled upcoming trips. TUI dropped flights to Rhodes through Friday. It said it had 39,000 customers on Rhodes as of Sunday evening.
About 20,000 people had to leave homes and hotels in Rhodes over the weekend as the inferno spread and reached coastal resorts on the island's southeast side, after charring land, killing animals and damaging buildings.
After a blaze in the seaside town of Mati, east of Athens, in 2018 killed 104 people, Greece has taken a more proactive approach toward evacuations. But critics say it has not improved its ability to put out fires that are common in summer, though more intense in this year's heat wave.
The Aegean dispute is a set of interrelated controversies between Greece and Turkey over sovereignty and related rights in the region of the Aegean Sea. This set of conflicts has strongly affected Greek-Turkish relations since the 1970s, and has twice led to crises coming close to the outbreak of military hostilities, in 1987 and in early 1996. The issues in the Aegean fall into several categories:
One aspect of the dispute is the differing interpretations of the maritime law: Turkey has not signed up to the Convention on the Continental Shelf nor the superseding United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, which as of May 2022 has been signed by 168 parties, including Greece; as such, Turkey does not recognize a legal continental shelf and EEZ around the Greek islands.
Between 1998 and the early 2010s, the two countries came closer to overcoming the tensions through a series of diplomatic measures, particularly with a view to easing Turkey's accession to the European Union. However, differences over suitable diplomatic paths to a substantial solution remained unresolved, and as of 2023 tensions remain.
Several of the Aegean issues deal with the delimitation of both countries' zones of influence in the air and on the sea around their respective territories. These issues owe their virulence to a geographical peculiarity of the Aegean sea and its territories. While the mainland coasts of Greece and Turkey bordering the Aegean Sea on both sides represent roughly equal shares of its total coastline, the overwhelming number of the many Aegean islands belong to Greece. In particular, there is a chain of Greek islands lined up along the Turkish west coast (Lesbos, Chios, Samos, and the Dodecanese islands), some of them in very close proximity to the mainland. Their existence blocks Turkey from extending any of its zones of influence beyond a few nautical miles off its coastline. As the breadth of maritime and aerial zones of influence, such as the territorial waters and national airspace, are measured from the nearest territory of the state in question, including its islands, any possible extension of such zones would necessarily benefit Greece much more than Turkey proportionally.
According to a popular perception[clarification needed] of these issues in the two countries, Turkey is concerned that Greece might be trying to extend its zones of influence to such a degree that it would turn the Aegean effectively into a "Greek lake". Conversely, Greece is concerned that Turkey might try to "occupy half of the Aegean", i.e. establish Turkish zones of influence towards the middle of the Aegean, beyond the chain of outlying Greek islands, turning these into a kind of exclave surrounded by Turkish waters, and thus cutting them off from their motherland.[1]
Territorial waters give the littoral state full control over air navigation in the airspace above, and partial control over shipping, although foreign ships (both civil and military) are normally guaranteed innocent passage through them. The standard width of territorial waters that countries are customarily entitled to has steadily increased in the course of the 20th century: from initially 3 nautical miles (5.6 km) at the beginning of the century, to 6 nautical miles (11 km), and currently 12 nautical miles (22 km). The current value has been enshrined in treaty law by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea of 1982 (Art.3). In the Aegean, the territorial waters claimed by both sides are still at 6 miles. The possibility of an extension to 12 miles has fuelled Turkish concerns over a possible disproportionate increase in Greek-controlled space. Turkey has not become a member of the convention and does not consider itself bound by it. Turkey considers the convention as res inter alios acta, i.e. a treaty that can only be binding to the signing parties but not to others. Greece, which is a party to the convention, has stated that it reserves the right to apply this rule and extend its waters to 12 miles at some point in the future in the Aegean Sea (it has already done so in the Ionian Sea to the west). Greece holds that the 12-mile rule is not only treaty law but also customary law, as per the wide consensus established among the international community. Against this, Turkey argues that the special geographical properties of the Aegean Sea make a strict application of the 12-mile rule in this case illicit in the interest of equity.[2] Turkey has itself applied the customary 12-mile limit to its coasts outside the Aegean.
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