- €803,979,311 for aerial firefighting — yet aerial firefighting we do not have.
- Spending in the air: on leasing and purchasing aircraft.
- As revealed, many of the brand-new aircraft sit unused, since they were purchased with no provision whatsoever for pilots or maintenance.
- The rigged arrangement for pilots.
By Paris Karvounopoulos
For yet another summer, the country is counting its dead, hundreds of thousands of acres of scorched forest, and countless properties reduced to ashes by the raging inferno.
The government was proven wrong once again, even though this year too it had declared itself fully prepared to confront the wildfire threat and had touted the strengthening of its aerial firefighting capabilities. The tragedy of the helicopter collision at Psatha comes to refute, in the most dramatic way possible, the government’s assurances of readiness. At the same time, this fixation on a single area of the country’s operational capabilities is now raising questions and suspicions, especially given that the same urgency is nowhere to be seen in the critical area of ground firefighting forces.
Even so, no one could fault the government for strengthening its aerial firefighting forces — provided, of course, that those forces could actually be used. And as it turns out, the aircraft were purchased, paid for by taxpayers, but they cannot fly.
The table shows the list of procurements announced by the Ministry of Climate Crisis and Civil Protection. Among the purchases are the CL-515 firefighting aircraft, which have not yet entered production. The sum total of the purchases is striking: €803,979,311.
The purchases were made without securing either the flight personnel to operate them or the technical base to maintain the aircraft.
As an official with knowledge of how the purchases were made explained to Data Journalists: “Everything was done without an operational plan, given that they have neither pilots nor technicians, nor even a technical base. In other words, they spent several hundred million without a comprehensive plan for procurement and operation.”
The most telling case is that of the AW139 helicopters, which — it should be noted — were purchased from Italy’s Leonardo, a company that has an agreement with Turkey and Baykar (a company owned by Erdoğan’s son-in-law) for the production of drones.
The helicopters were purchased primarily for medical evacuation missions but also for use in firefighting operations. The helicopters are not flying because pilots have not yet been trained, and it is telling that the manufacturing company — which also sold Greece the training program — is practically… begging for operators to be sent to it so they can be trained to fly the helicopters.
This is where things really get interesting — the part that has to do with “meritocracy,” Greek-style.
The Fire Service chose two operators over the age of 60, instead of younger operators who could be trained and would then be able to fly the helicopters for years to come, rather than for just one or, at most, two years.
As for the Air Force, a month ago an order was issued calling for expressions of interest from its officers. As it turns out, however, the order was rather “tailor-made.” This can be inferred from a none-too-innocent change that was made to the order.
The original order required operators holding a Category B qualification or higher. The “correction” involved removing this requirement. Coincidentally, following the “correction,” officers who did not hold Category B instructor qualifications or higher, and who were serving in desk jobs, were selected to undergo training so that they could, at some point, fly the AW139 helicopters. One particularly telling example is that of another pilot who has not flown in at least five years.
What will happen with technical support
Even if the selection of the pilots who would fly the helicopters had been properly planned in advance, there remains another absolutely fundamental issue for their use: their maintenance, since this too was never planned for.
The Air Force could take this on, but according to sources within the Fire Service, “these helicopters cannot be integrated into the Armed Forces because their purchase was financed through a European Union program.”
The same sources confirm that an international tender is already underway, conducted through NATO’s NSPA, concerning the operational and technical inspection of these helicopters by a private company.
The experience of the Armed Forces and the Security Corps with maintenance carried out by private contractors has simply been tragic. We need only recall the… “liberation” of Hellenic Police helicopters, carried out in the dead of night from the facilities of a private company that had been holding them… hostage.
