Australia’s national aerial firefighting body has conceded that its strategy of hiring water bombers from a shared global pool will be challenged in future years, with northern and southern fire seasons now overlapping so heavily that aircraft no longer move freely between hemispheres. That is according to the National Aerial Firefighting Centre, which contracted 175 aircraft for the 2025-26 bushfire season and put the concession on record as Europe’s fires pulled Australian crews and machines north.
“Aircraft are not moving between areas,” John Boag, chief executive of Europe’s biggest aerial emergency services firm Avincis, told Reuters in an interview published on 27 July. Pilots have grown harder to hire, he said, as a season once running three or four months stretched into a run from March through to October.
Governments will have to pay for aircraft across a full 12 months, Boag warned, because commercial operators can no longer fly south to earn off-season revenue. Lisbon-based Avincis runs 180 helicopters and 40 fixed-wing aircraft worldwide, including 22 Canadair water bombers.
Plantation growers carry that exposure directly, with 130,200 hectares of Australia’s plantations inside the fire extent of the 2019-20 bushfires on the ABARES count, or 6.7 per cent of the estate. New South Wales accounted for 92,100 hectares of the total, nearly a quarter of the state’s plantations, and ABARES forecast softwood log availability falling from an average of 17 million cubic metres a year across 2015 to 2019 to 15 million across the five years that followed.
European fires have burnt almost 435,000 hectares across the 27 EU member states to 29 July, second only to 2022 for the time of year on European Forest Fire Information System records. France broke its own cumulative annual record by nearly 24,700 hectares over the same period, with more than 220,000 people leaving the Gironde west of Bordeaux in what may be the country’s largest peacetime evacuation.
It comes as Australian operators moved north this season, with Pay’s Air Service basing 14 aircraft across Greece under a Hellenic Fire Service contract held since 2021, Ballarat’s Field Air Group flying alongside it, and Adelaide’s Aerotech Group working a fourth season at Bordeaux with four aircraft and six pilots. Two crew, a Greek national and a Danish national, died on 2 August when helicopters leased from Australian company McDermott Aviation collided west of Athens.
The Royal Commission that followed Black Summer recommended a sovereign firefighting fleet, and six years on, Australia still hires its aircraft rather than owning them. A federal government spokesperson told SBS News the Commonwealth has committed A$35 million over two years from 2024 on top of a standing $31 million a year, while conceding that overlapping demand puts more pressure on aerial resources.
“It’s a risk that’s already been realised,” Trent Penman, who leads the FLARE Wildfire Research group at the University of Melbourne, said of the contest for aerial assets, naming the southern California fires that killed 30 people and destroyed 16,000 structures in January last year at the height of Australia’s summer.
Prevention has drawn far less money than response, according to Marta Yebra, director of the Bushfire Research Centre of Excellence, who argues Australia should stop assuming it can always reach shared international resources. Drones able to work at night, and in weather that grounds crewed aircraft, are the technology she names as part of the answer.
NAFC counts 175 aircraft under contract and as many as 250 available at peak demand, with 95 per cent of them Australian-owned and registered. Asked last September whether the missing sovereign fleet leaves Australians exposed, Emergency Management Minister Kristy McBain answered that the fleet remains “under review.”
