Aerial Tree Bombing Plan?

Bombing the planet with trees? Sounds like a far-fetched plan, but TreeHugger.com has resurrected an old Guardian newspaper article from 1999 about the possibilities of aerial seed planting. The original proposal was to drop tree saplings from decommissioned military C-130 Hercules cargo planes that were originally designed to drop land mines.

Lockheed Martin and Aerial Forestation Inc, of Newton (Massachusetts, USA), took on the concept that was put forward by RAF pilot Jack Walters. The modified plane was estimated to be able to drop 900,000 trees in a day.

“The possibilities are amazing,” Peter Simmons told the Guardian. “We can fly at 1,000ft at 130 knots planting more than 3,000 cones a minute in a pattern across the landscape – just as we did with landmines, but in this case each cone contains a sapling. That’s 125,000 trees for each area and 900,000 trees in a day.”

The aerial tree bomb system was designed to delivery saplings, some fertilizer and moisture, and bury itself in the soil deep enough to foster the sapling to grow. The system proposed using biodegradable casings to provide the fertilizer component as they dissolve and with the an aerodynamic shape to ensure an upright delivery at ground level.

The idea seemed like a great one – especially for large carbon footprint companies and governments that wanted to redeem themselves without having to pay for an army of tree planters, working in back breaking conditions for months in the wilderness.

Now, given Canada’s reluctance to do anything much about global climate change, and Alberta’s Tar Sands operations belching out megatons of CO2, as well as turning part of the Canadian Boreal Forest into Mordor (the hellish mines of Lord of the Rings fame), one would like to think that this would be a good idea to implement in Canada.

Between the Canadian federal government, the Albertan government and the Tar Sands conglomerates, you would think they could buy an old Hercules, put some money into the project and start reseeding the country and maybe help stabilize some of the melting permafrost with new trees.

Via Treehugger (and dusted off from the Guardian).

Trevor Williams is a University of Victoria Mechanical Engineering PhD candidate specializing in renewable energy, power grid modeling and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles. He has a bachelors in Aeronautical Engineering, a Masters in Management Science and over 23 years international experience in the space industry, having worked on Earth observation and telecommunications satellites. He is the author of the Eco-Geek blog.

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