The Government declared it “urgent” to modernize the elite amphibious aircraft fleet in March 2022. Four years and four months later, it has had to cancel the contract. The final result of said renovation is zero. And yet, in that document, held by EL MUNDO, the Ministry for Ecological Transition assured, without mincing words, that “the opportunity cost of not carrying out said modernization task could lead to a significant decrease in forest fire fighting support capabilities”.
This failed modernization was not precisely circumstantial, but rather the Government described it as “imperative, given the current state of the fleet, which has sometimes resulted in prolonged inoperability as well as an increasing cost of equipment and system maintenance”.
Now, at the peak of the 2026 fire season, the Executive has had to declare the tender extinguished, after a company appealed the modifications made by the Ministry for not being “foreseen in the contract”. That is, since the project actually cost more than what was budgeted, in the end the opportunity to refurbish no less than 10 Canadair 215 amphibious aircraft with European funds has been lost. In fact, the deadline to use the community aid has expired.
The cancellation of the contract comes just when the Government has a deficit of these top-category seaplanes, known as FOCA. On the vast majority of days of the anti-fire campaign, only seven have been operational, due to breakdowns and maintenance. Just when it is short of three, Spain has requested four of these FOCA aircraft from the EU: two will come from Greece and two from Italy. Rather than adding additional personnel in the face of the virulence of the fires in Madrid and Ávila, they will largely replace the aircraft that are not operational.
FOCA aircraft are the most effective and versatile in forest firefighting, as they load directly from rivers, reservoirs, or the sea, and have a water tank with a capacity of between 5,500 and 6,000 liters, with the possibility of performing single or partial discharges, as well as foam injection equipment.
But these FOCA aircraft suffer increasingly recurrent problems, precisely due to the lack of modernization. And this has brought tensions between ministries to light. On July 6, the Ministry for Ecological Transition complained, in an email to the autonomous communities exclusively reported by this newspaper, that “the fleet is increasingly old (with aircraft over 40 years old), which implies more unforeseen incidents, apart from ordinary revisions and maintenance”.
Internal criticism within the Government is directed at the Ministry of Defense, which operates and maintains the fleet. Margarita Robles‘ department signed an agreement with Ecological Transition to have “at least 10 elite amphibious aircraft” throughout “the entire fire campaign”. No matter what happened, whether there were breakdowns or not. That’s precisely why there is a fleet of 14 aircraft, so that 10 are always available even if unforeseen events, overheating, or simply an overload of flight hours occur.
With the project to implement technical improvement “kits” for the aircraft that has now been canceled, Spain was going to meet milestone 66 of the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan that articulates European funds: “Completion of updates and modernizations of firefighting aircraft, and commissioning of the biodiversity knowledge monitoring and management system”.
This was going to translate into “at least ten updated and modernized special-purpose firefighting aircraft (Canadair)”. The deadline for achieving that objective ended on June 30, 2026. And the Government declared the contract extinguished on July 10, according to documentation held by this newspaper.
Sources from the Ministry for Ecological Transition assure that the main problem why this contract for improving the aircraft software did not go ahead was that the manufacturer “demanded two million additional euros, violating all Spanish contracting regulations”.
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Now the Ministry for Ecological Transition will have to re-tender the project, but already outside the deadline for fulfilling the community milestone. In fact, the Executive has given up using the funds planned to modernize the aircraft and has redirected them to other types of actions in favor of biodiversity.
But wasn’t this a vital action for effective forest fire fighting? Without a doubt, according to the document signed on March 23, 2022, by the Secretary of State for the Environment, Hugo Morán. In that “declaration of urgency”, Morán assured that “with the aim of maintaining, and even increasing, the operability, effectiveness, efficiency, and safety with which the service has been provided, it is necessary to modernize part of the aforementioned state fleet, specifically 10 of the 14 CL-215T aircraft, including an additional reserve kit”. And then he insists that it is an “imperative” need.
Four years ago, Morán already warned that fires would worsen, which forced the fleet to be improved, because the firefighting work itself was “compromised”. “It is also significant to maintain operational status and in accordance with current safety protocols, in a climate change scenario, where an increase in the intensity and severity of forest fires is expected, compromising in some cases the existing firefighting capabilities,” he wrote.
In the explanatory memorandum of the 2022 modernization plan, it was already warned that “in recent years, the operability of the state fleet has been diminished by the existence of obsolescence and recurrent breakdowns as a consequence of its aging, which makes their resolution essential,” as reported by Okdiario. That memorandum added that there are new community regulatory requirements that “limit, in practice, the participation of these aircraft in international missions”.
The disarray and blame-sharing do not end there. The National Forest Fire Information Coordination Center, belonging to the General Directorate of Biodiversity of the Ministry for Ecological Transition, has complained that the Ministry of Defense delays the process of tuning up these damaged aircraft. “The forecast for aircraft recovery” is received daily from the Air Force, it recalls, but “those forecasts are changing”.
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