A wall of orange climbs a Greek hillside, and out of the smoke drops a white-and-blue jet skimming the sea. It touches the waves, drinks twelve tonnes of water in fourteen seconds, hauls itself back into the sky and unloads the lot onto the flames. This is the Beriev Be-200 Altair, the only amphibious water bomber on Earth powered by jet engines.

Beriev built it on the bones of the Cold War A-40 Albatross, a giant anti-submarine flying boat. Where the military machine hunted submarines, the civilian Altair hunts fire. Its boat hull lets it operate from lakes, rivers and open sea, so it never has to trek back to a distant airfield to reload.

Two turbofans on the shoulders

The secret sits high above the waterline. Two Progress D-436TP turbofans are mounted on top of the wing roots, keeping their intakes clear of spray during the violent business of scooping. That layout is what lets a jet do a flying boat's job without swallowing seawater.

A crew of two flies it. On a firefighting run the Be-200 skims the surface at close to takeoff speed, drops retractable scoops, and fills eight internal tanks with roughly 12,000 litres. It can refill on water again and again, delivering hundreds of tonnes onto a blaze in a single sortie.

A firefighter for hire across borders

The Altair has become an aerial mercenary against wildfire. It has fought blazes in Portugal, Greece, Israel, Italy and Turkey, often leased in for the worst of the summer season when local fleets are overwhelmed.

It is fast for its class, cruising far quicker than the propeller-driven water bombers it flies alongside, which means shorter gaps between drops. Only around twenty have been built, and geopolitics has complicated exports, but no rival has copied the formula.

The Be-200 remains a strange and magnificent contradiction: an airliner-fast jet that lands on lakes, a warplane's hull turned to saving forests. When the fire season comes, few aircraft are more welcome overhead.

The Be-200 in action: an airliner-fast jet that lands on water:

Sources: Simple Flying; TASS; Wikipedia.