Foreign firefighting aircraft

This is not the first time that foreign (European) firefighting aircraft come to the aid the Greek firefighting forces.The scale of the disastrous forest fires of the summer of 2007, caused an equally large response. This resulted in the arrival of 39 firefighting aircraft from 16 different countries.
It should be mentioned, that this response would have been much broader if the fires hadn't coincided with equally catastrophic fires in Portugal and Sicily.Despite being hard pressed, both Italy and Portugal spared one aircraft each.
The following table shows in detail the participation of the foreign aircraft in the firefighting from 25.08.2007 up until 05.09.2007.This does not include the aircraft that are leased by the Greek government every summer for firefighting, from various foreign private companies.
The first aircraft to land in Greece was an Italian Bombardier CL-415.This happened at 18.19 of August 25 in Eleusis Air Force base.
After 1hr and 16min a French CL-415 landed in the same airfield.
The longest flying distance was covered by the UH-1H from Sweden and the B-412 from Norway.Unfortunately there is no data available as to the duration, or the refuelling stops of these flights.
The first to depart was the Italian CL-415 on August 30, due to the large fires in Sicily.
A glance at the table shows that the French CL-415s flew the most (168 hrs), while the most flying hours per aircraft were put by the two Spanish CL-415s(48,65hrs on average).
All foreign CL-215 and CL-415 aircraft were based in Eleusis AFB which is easily axplainable by it being the base of all Hellenic Air Force same type aircraft and their maintainace units.
For between operations landings and other than refuelling reasons other airfields were used susch as 120 TW at Kalamata,114 CW at Tanagra,116 CW at Araxos and 117 CW at Andravida which was used as a base by the three German CH-53GΑs and the two Βö 105s.
The six PZL P.18 Dromader and the Antonov An2 from Serbia were based in Epitalio which also is used by the Greek PZL aircraft.
All helicopters except the Dutch and Swiss Super Pumas were based in Dekelia airfield, the former operating out of Tripolis in central Peloponissos and the latter from further south at Kalamata.
This is a first brief acount of the valuable help offered by the foreign aircraft in fighting the disastrous fires of 2007.
We believe that official Greece will honor accordingly all the flying and ground personnel that helped at such a difficult time.

In the operations also took part other foreign aircraft that are based in Greece every summer , leased by the Greek government.

Sikorsky S 64_Skycrane