De Havilland calls for national water bomber fleet as it scrambles to meet demand

MONTREAL — On July 13, a pair of Canadair water bombers touched down on the Seine River, skimming along its surface to refill their water tanks as they battled a wildfire south of Paris. The “super scoopers,” with their signature ketchup-red wing tips on a mustard-yellow body, sucked up 6,000-plus litres from France’s most famous waterway in one go as part of a fight against the flames then rampaging across Europe. The event in north-central France underscored how wildfires are ranging even farther from their traditional grounds and fuelling an urgent need for water bombers to fend off climate disasters.

The iconic Canadair turboprops serve as the only amphibious firefighting aircraft currently in production built from the outset for that purpose, rather than being retrofitted to douse flames. Now, the Canadian company behind the water-scooping planes is calling for a national fleet of them at home, even as it struggles to meet soaring demand from across a warming globe. De Havilland Aircraft of Canada revived production of the legendary Canadair planes in 2024 after European countries from Portugal to Greece placed orders for a program whose assembly line had halted in 2015, when it was run by Bombardier Inc.

That hiatus meant a supply chain that drew on 60,000 parts for the firefighting turboprop had evaporated, with procurement a major hurdle that pushed the projected delivery date for the first Canadair DHC-515 (formerly called the CL-515) to early 2028. Neil Sweeney, De Havilland’s vice-president of corporate affairs, says an order for 50 new water bombers from the federal government or the provinces would give it the financial runway — hundreds of millions of dollars — to launch a second production line at its new assembly plant east of Calgary. “If we want to stop fires from becoming large and becoming megafires, we need to get on them quicker.

And the only way to get on them quicker is to have the infrastructure to do so,” he said, citing water bombers as the backbone of an aerial strategy that includes smaller scoopers, evacuation helicopters and air tankers with fire retardants. “These fires are becoming significantly more damaging — devastating — and either we invest money upfront in prevention or we’re going to pay for it in reconstruction.” Sweeney pointed to wildfires that took out about 400 structures in Jasper, Alta., in 2024 and hundreds mo…