The RAF is procuring an initial containerised aerial firefighting capability for the A400M Atlas, which will be available to support the 2027 wildfire season, according to the Ministry of Defence.
Ben Obese-Jecty, the Conservative MP for Huntingdon, asked how many kits will be purchased, when crews will be fully trained, what assessment had been made of the kit’s availability, and whether it will be permanently available before July 2027.
Luke Pollard, Minister for Defence Readiness and Industry, gave the reply: “The Royal Air Force is procuring an initial containerised aerial firefighting capability for the A400M Atlas aircraft to enhance the UK’s ability to respond to significant wildfire incidents. The capability will be available to support the 2027 wildfire season and represents an important first step towards establishing a sovereign military aerial firefighting capability within the UK.”
Prime Minister Andy Burnham announced at the Wildfire Resilience Summit last month that RAF Chinooks and A400Ms will be equipped for firefighting and deployed on request, the first time military aircraft will be used to fight wildfires in the UK. He said “military aircraft will stand ready to help tackle wildfires from the sky.” Defence Secretary Wes Streeting said “defence will step up to provide greater support to our emergency services”.
Chinooks practised firefighting in Cyprus during Exercise Ifestos in May, tackling a mock blaze at Machairas National Forest near Nicosia, and can carry a Bambi bucket underneath. France became the first nation to use the A400M’s firefighting capability in a real-world setting in July, AIN reported, using a roll-on, roll-off kit that enables the drop of around 22 tonnes of fire retardant.
Excellent news. Many have been calling for just such a sovereign capability for some time.
Different topic. The Royal International Air Tattoo have just announced all future shows will be held at MOD Boscombe Down. Starting from 2027. No more Fairford.
As if traffic in/around Salisbury and on the A303 wasn’t bad enough already!
Yeah, it’s certainly a busy area.
Parking your car on the 303 in the summer months is all part of the fun… that’s why I have an in car kettle and snacks.
Turn right at Amesbury roundabout, hang a left through Larkhill Garrison, you avoid a lot of the mayhem around Stonehenge. Depending how soon you rejoin the 303 you’ll still be slow through Winterbourne Stoke though. The 303 and A30 was single lane for most of it all the way to Devon at one time, when it took us 7 hours to North Devon!
It’s improved massively since with the duel carriageway sections, and passes near lots of Defence sites of interest as well.
Or we could just create firebreaks? Much cheaper and no overstretch for overcommitted servicemen and equipment.
Oh! We can’t do that anymore…
‘Winter burns create firebreaks in upland areas by forming strips where there is less flammable foliage, thereby limiting the speed at which wildfires can spread.
But in 2021, the burns were banned from areas of “deep peat” – where it extends for 40cm or deeper – in conservation areas, totalling 222,000 hectares of land.
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) is now consulting on plans to extend the burning restrictions to 368,000 hectares of peat by lowering the threshold for “deep peat” to 30cm.’
Genius! Or not really…
Should be making the peat bogs actual bogs again with re wetting
In the end nobody really gives a shit if uplands burn, that’s just nature.. this is about towns and fields.
A good step to resilience.. now all we need is
1) some snow resilience, because if the AMOC keeps on stalling quicker than the planets heating we is going to get very very cold winters very quickly and our snow preparedness is utterly beyond shite.. it actually not even there, so shite does not really describe something so none existent. As a major incident manager I can hand on heart say we just used to sit there ( at our kitchen tables because nobody could get us to the major incident rooms) hoping it did what good UK snow does and melts quickly enough that we can pretend nothing happened and that nobody really noticed our entire system just collapsed, because they were out sledging, and the people that died or suffered was limited and could be blamed on a bit of bad luck.
2) water security… I studied the south easts water security issues when I was an environmental science undergraduate 40 years ago..and we have done literally fuck all for 40 years other than let our infrastructure decay..
3)heat deaths.. our housing stock is utter shite at the management of heat and if the AMOC does not mitigate global warming we are going to get a lot of heat casualties. Europe is the fastest-warming continent, heating at approximately 0.56°C per decade—more than double the global average. Something we did not think would happen.. they EU risk assessments I had access to in the 2000s essentially wrote off Africa, China and the central US belt.. it never really considered Europe would be the most effected continent, this is because of its geographic proximity to the Arctic, changing jet stream and atmospheric circulation patterns ( the artic is essentially the planets hot spot.
Ohh yes and food resilience.. what nation does not have grain stores available to feed iself for a year.. we are fucking idiots..
“Containerised initial fire fighting capability” which will consist of 1 x ISO container, lobbed out the back, and on landing 6 x private soldiers from the guardroom jump out pulling the fire cart, 4 x sand buckets and the guard 2ic gobbing off about the standard of ironing! Hang on I’ve been reliably informed the ISO container has been deemed to expensive…….