Faced with the worst season of forest fires in 15 years, the French government is to launch a tender to replace two Conair-modified Fokker F27s, the oldest aircraft in its fleet of 25 firefighters, says the civil security department.
Interior minister Nicholas Sarkozy has promised that the F27s, which carry 4.9t of fire retardant, will be replaced with medium-to-large capacity (12-15t) aircraft as soon as possible. New blazes were sweeping through southern France last week.
In July alone, France's airborne firefighters, consisting of 11 Bombardier CL-415s, 12 Conair-modified Grumman Trackers and the two F27s, had clocked up 7,000h against 3,665h for the same period last year.
Aircraft and pilots have been pushed to their limits and accidents "only just avoided". One of the Trackers has been grounded after hitting a power line, although the pilot was able to land safely.
From 1 July to early September, 54,000Ha (133,400 acres) had gone up in flames across southern France and Corsica, against 20,800Ha for the whole of 2002. The difficulties for the pilots lay in a combination of factors, including the number of simultaneous fires and because the fires were moving at 3-4km/h (2-2.5mph), compared with 800m/h normally.
In response, France made rare use of its mutual assistance accords with Greece, Italy and Spain, which each loaned two CL-415s, while Russia loaned two Mil Mi-26T helicopters that can carry between 10t and 12t of water.
Italy also loaned a Sikorsky S-64 Skycrane with 9t capacity. In addition, France has rented a Convair 580 from Canada until the end of this month.
Source: Flight International
