On Thursday, Air Tanker 911, a DC-10 Very Large Air Tanker, made its first drops on the Wallow fire in Arizona, dropping retardant near the Community of Greer which was overrun by the fire Wednesday evening. The DC-10 can carry up to 11,000 gallons of fire retardant, almost four times the capacity of a conventional large air tanker.

AZfamily.com has a gallery of 20 excellent photos of the DC-10 in action. But I think few if any of the photos were taken in Arizona; I could be wrong.

It is good to see the DC-10 being used, but again, very large air tankers don’t put out fires. They slow them down, like other air tankers, if the wind and terrain conditions are favorable. Firefighters on the ground put fires out.