Martian Twilight? Contributing Editor James Kightly brings us up to date with the Coulson Group’s Martin Mars water bombers in Canada, including an interview with Wayne Coulson.
T
he monsters of Vancouver Island are the last two Martin Mars flying boats. Hawaii Mars, C-FLYL and Philippine Mars C-FLYK have had several changes of ownership, but have been based at Sproat Lake since the sixties. Converted back then from their original role of transports for the US Navy, by an innovative organisation of forestry companies, Flying Tankers Inc, in 2007, the facility and Mars aircraft were acquired by The Coulson Group. The new owners decided to upgrade the Mars with the latest technology suite to be competitive in the fire fighting environment. In 2009, Coulson installed a Garmin EFIS Glass Cockpit system in the Hawaii Mars, enabling additional displays of GPS, Synthetic Vision Terrain Avoidance, Traffic Collision Avoidance, and Weather data to the primary flight instrumentation, now on the new ‘glass’ cockpit. Comms were upgraded too, with multiple FM radio fittings 48 | F L I G H T PAT H
and multiple sat phone connections, enhanced by the newly developed ‘Coulson Air Tanker Information System’ that transmits real time event data over the iridium satellite network. The Mars has been busy in Coulson ownership. Wayne Coulson stated “We took the Hawaii Mars to the October, 2007 San Diego fire storm in Southern California. In 2008, we spent the summer at Lake Shasta in Northern California when the State declared a National Emergency after thousands of lightning strikes. 2009 led us to Southern California with a USFS Exclusive Use Contract, where we spent 160 days in the Los Angeles basin at Lake Elsinore.” He went on to add: “In 2011, we got out early and performed a 20-day contract in Mexico that was featured on a Discovery Channel show, Mighty Planes.” But support from the local British Columbia (B.C.) provincial government has been lacking, with the Mars contract being cancelled in