"Morgans" wrote in
:


"Private" wrote

Watching a team of CL-215/415s doing circuits is really impressive,
they are much more graceful in the air than they look on the ground
or in the video Dave linked. Real retardant is more effective than
plain water but the CL-215/415 can deliver a lot of plain water.
They seem to be able to work out of quite small lakes.
http://ww.airliners.net/info/stats.main?id=119

They are also capable of adding a chemical to the water they scoop, to
make it fire retardant, and usually do.

Interesting thing is that the whole plane (I'm only intimately
familiar with the 215, but I am pretty sure that the 415 is the same
in this regard) uses all manual power for all of the control surfaces
except the flaps. They use muscle power at low speeds, then as speed
builds, a spring arrangement lets aerodynamically boosted tabs move
the control surfaces. I was surprised to learn that.



Yes, lots of airplanes that size have servo tabs to boost the controls. The
spring tab actually reduces the effectiveness of the servo tab at higher
speeds, to couteract the servo tab's natural tendency to provide more power
as speed is increased. I'm not familiar with the installation on the
Canadair, but I'd say if you investigated you'd find that's how they work


Bertie