There are Franco-German lifts and pressures on the airplane market For the fight against fires, in competition with the solution proposed by Leonardo Velivoli for a version appropriately modified by the C-27J Spartan tactical military transport twist. For some time the giant of Toulouse, Airbus, has been collaborating with the French study Hynaero for the development of an amphibian aircraft, the bi-turbolic fregote-f100, with the intent of a European alternative to the Canadair market. And on March 14 Airbus announced the signature of a Memorandum in agreement (Mou) to share the design of the new airplane with Hynaero pushing the Fregate-F100 project towards its next phases.
But there is more: similarly to Leonardo, In reality Airbus wants to propose the fire versions of its C-295 and A-400m, creating a real “fire-fighting ecosystem” including the services offered by the range of helicopters, satellites for observation and dedicated communication systems. A proposal that obviously not all other competitors would be able to formulate. The idea is to outclass the proposal of the De Havilland Aircraft of Canada which is working on the substitute of the famous CL-415Con the DHC-515, also financed by the EU with 600 million euros. Jean-Brice Dumont, Director of the Airbus Defense and Space section, he said: “The Fregate-F100 project is a very promising project for the development of a modern and high-performance aircraft for the direct attack on fire.” David Pink, founding partner and president of Hynaero, commented: “This alliance will allow us to accelerate the development of the Fregate-F100 by offering a modern and efficient alternative to the current fleets of aircraft for this type of missions, which are obsolete models, and to open up to partnership throughout Europe.”
The company is based in Bordeaux, a place whose airport also houses several Dassault plants. Technically, the F100 Fregate would still be very similar to the CL-515, but with a greater capacity in the transport of water, declared by ten tons, and with a cruise speed of 250 knots (460 km/h), or a little faster than the CL-515, and an autonomy of at least four hours. Parameters, these, defined to allow greater speed of intervention and a duration of the missions on the target of at least two and a half hours. In the intentions of the designers there is the application of many French technologies starting from the Fly-by-Wire control system (mediated and operated by computers), typical of Dassault and Airbus, the installation of Heads-up display screens on which the flight data are projected and the basis of all the digital twin of the airplane that will integrate the predictive maintenance system. Last year, in May, Hynaero also signed an agreement with Onera (the maximum French institution specialist in aerodynamics), to collaborate in the Fregte project on various aspects, from the optimization of the wing profiles that characterize flight performance, to the instrumentation (man-macrine interface), on flight control technologies, up to the campaign of the tests on the vibrations on the ground, the management systems of the missions engineering data of the project. In the press release on the Hynaero website we read: “IlFregate-F100, watering bomber of water with a useful load capacity and unparalleled autonomy on the market, will restore European and French sovereignty in the field of fire-fighting aerial skills and is a project fully aligned with the re-industrialization objectives of France. And there are those who delude themselves that they can even create a European defense.
